Facebook Won't Ban Bannon After Beheading Remark - But Breasts Remain Fair Game
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has reportedly avoided a ban from Facebook after suggesting America’s top infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray should be beheaded.
Bannon – who also served as senior counsellor to outgoing President Donald Trump from January to August 2017 – made the comments in his War Room: Pandemic talk show, which was shared across several social networks.
“I’d put the heads on pikes,” Bannon said. “I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats.”
Twitter removed an account belonging to Bannon in response, but Facebook has only opted to remove the offending content.
According to a recording heard by Reuters, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told an all-staff meeting on Thursday that Bannon had not violated enough of the company’s policies to justify a ban.
“We have specific rules around how many times you need to violate certain policies before we will deactivate your account completely,” Zuckerberg said. “While the offences here, I think, came close to crossing that line, they clearly did not cross the line.”
The decision appears to be the latest in a somewhat uneven policy in respect of what bans or suspensions the company does and doesn’t enact.
Last month Facebook updated its policies to ban content that “denies or distorts the Holocaust”, more than two years after Zuckerberg suggested such posts were allowed in the name of freedom of speech. The update followed a crackdown on other forms of hate speech, including the banning of a number of white supremacist groups, as well as content around militia groups and the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Here are some of the more unlikely matters which have results in bans and suspensions.
Breastfeeding, mastectomy, birth
Despite the social network’s insistence that its nudity policies have become more nuanced over time, Facebook has repeatedly come under fire for issuing...
