Facebook to Search Users’ Data to Call Out ‘Hate Agents’ and Ban Them from the Platform


A leaked document shows that Facebook is tracking and monitoring users’ online and offline behavior to determine whether they should be designated as a “hate agent” and banned from the platform. Facebook’s “Hate Agent Policy Review” document reveals many “signals” to identify so-called hate agents, including praising the wrong individual, interviewing them, or appearing at events alongside them. Tattoos of “hate symbols or hate slogans” and possessing “hate paraphernalia” are also signals. Facebook will categorize people as a hate agent for “statements made in private but later made public,” and the company has shown that it will publicize private information on their users to assist the media in hitjobs on regular American citizens. Mainstream media competes with online personalities for an audience and will likely support Facebook’s new policy. Facebook will search users’ histories over the past two years.

Facebook monitors the offline behavior of its users to determine if
they should be categorized as a “Hate Agent,” according to a document
provided exclusively to Breitbart News by a source within the social
media giant.

The document, titled “Hate Agent Policy Review” outlines a series of
“signals” that Facebook uses to determine if someone ought to be
categorized as a “hate agent” and banned from the platform.

Those signals include a wide range of on- and off-platform behavior.
If you praise the wrong individual, interview them, or appear at events
alongside them, Facebook may categorize you as a “hate agent.”

Facebook may also categorize you as a hate agent if you self-identify
with or advocate for a “Designated Hateful Ideology,” if you associate
with a “Designated Hate Entity” (one of the examples cited by Facebook
as a “hate entity” includes Islam critic Tommy Robinson), or if you have
“tattoos of hate symbols or hate slogans.” (The document cites no
examples of these, but the media and “anti-racism” advocacy groups
increasingly label innocuous items as “hate symbols,” including a cartoon frog and the “OK” hand sign.)

Facebook will also categorize you as a hate agent for possession of
“hate paraphernalia,” although the document provides no examples of what
falls into this category.

The document also says Facebook will categorize you as a hate agent
for “statements made in private but later made public.” Of course,
Facebook holds vast amounts of information on what you say in public and in private — and as we saw with the Daily Beast doxing story, the platform will publicize private information on their users to assist the media in hitjobs on regular American citizens.

Breitbart News has already covered some of the individuals that
Facebook placed on its list of potential “hate agents.” Paul Joseph
Watson eventually was categorized as “hateful” and banned from the
platform, in part, according to the document, because he praised Tommy
Robinson and interviewed him on his YouTube channel. Star conservative
pundit Candace Owens and conservative author and terrorism expert Brigitte Gabriel were also on the list, as were British politicians Carl Benjamin and Anne Marie Waters.

The Benjamin addition reveals that Facebook may categorize you as a
hate agent merely for speaking neutrally about individuals and
organizations that the social network considers hateful. In the
document, Facebook tags Benjamin with a “hate agent” signal for “neutral
representation of John Kinsman, member of Proud Boys” on October 21
last year.

Facebook also accuses Benjamin, a classical liberal and critic of
identity politics, as “representing the ideology of an ethnostate” for a
post in which he calls out an actual advocate of an ethnostate.

In addition to the more unorthodox signals that Facebook uses to
determine if its users are “hate agents,” there is also, predictably,
“hate speech.” Facebook divides hate speech into three tiers depending on severity and considers attacks on a person’s “immigration status” to be hate speech.

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