Back in 2022, the Center for Countering Digital Hate released a blistering report finding that social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok all failed to remove 90 percent of Islamophobic content from their platforms.
Facebook, in particular, had only stepped in to moderate seven out of 125 posts flagged by the Center, in direct violation of its own community guidelines on “expressions of contempt.”
Fast forward four years, and it’s clear the platform has only become worse.
As we reported over the weekend, the social media platform is currently teeming with various forms of Islamophobic and anti-Arab content. It’s a noxious blend of propaganda and misinformation, with often AI-generated imagery whipping viewers into a bigoted frenzy; many who interact with the miasma of online hatred then post more intolerance, harassment, and calls for violence — both from the state and by private citizens — against Muslim Americans.
While Facebook’s older, more conservative user base has long been a haven for Islamophobia, the recent frenzy is reaching a fever pitch directed at residents of Dearborn, Michigan, who make up the largest Arab-American community in the United States.
Much of that vitriol can be traced back to white supremacist social media personality Jake Lang, who recently shared an AI-generated flyer calling on his reactionary followers to wage a “crusader march on Dearborn” on Tuesday, August 18th.
The post calls on Lang’s followers to “stop [the] Islamification of America,” and features imagery of Catholic crusaders charging at Arabs with swords drawn — an overt reference to the medieval crusades, during which Catholic soldiers slaughtered millions of Muslims, Jews, and Orthodox Christians.
Despite dripping in obvious references to anti-Muslim violence, Facebook refuses to take the post down. After reporting it to the platform for going against its own policies on “calling for violence,” we received a seemingly automated message exactly one minute later explaining that Facebook “didn’t remove the post.”
Plenty of other posts remain up despite having been reported to Facebook for similar grounds. One post saying that “it’s time for hunting” hasn’t been touched a day after it was reported, and neither has a comment on Futurism’s own post calling Muslims “f**kin rag headed pedophiles.”
Another comment posted under a news bulletin about the Dearborn hysteria literally says “I hope we kill people” in reply to a comment seething that the “first shot has to be heard somewhere,” neither of which have been taken down after we reported them for calling for violence.
And though a number of posts Futurism flagged to Facebook’s parent company Meta as part of a request for comment have been hidden, more remain up, even after our initial reporting on Sunday. One of the most flagrant examples is a comment — under a reel containing AI-generated imagery — which calls Muslims “cockroaches that have infested our beautiful country” and insists we need to “remove each and every moslim [sic] man, woman, and child.”
Rhetoric comparing humans to bugs clearly falls under “dehumanizing” content at least, and calls for violence at worst. There are hundreds of years of precedent here: as far back as 17th century England, people in powerful positions have invoked ideas of “parasitism” and “vermin” to justify ethnic violence. The rhetorical move has come back into vogue over the past few years, fueled by increasingly popular far-right figures like Lang and his contemporary Nick Fuentes.
Put together, it comes as little surprise that a company with Facebook’s genocide-enabling track record would act so flagrantly in service of these hard-line reactionaries. There’s no question that this kind of content is wildly popular with the platform’s user base, and therefore financially beneficial for Meta to propagate — and at the end of the day, isn’t that what it’s all about?
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