Re:Facebook to ban white nationalist content
by manfredo on Thursday March 28, 2019 @02:11AM
(#19509694)
My understanding is that membership of terrorist or rebel groups is illegal (and in fact can be grounds for US force to kill US citizens without trial like several US citizens killed while being a member of Al-Qaeda* ). But membership of groups that are... let's just say "unsavory" is not itself illegal. I don't know about groups like Atomwaffen to determine whether they belong to the former or the latter.
\* Which did stir up some controversy, but is not all that surprising. The precedence for this dates back to the US Civil War, it would be ridiculous to claim that the Union Army criminally murdered hundreds of thousands of US citizens on the battlefield without trial when the latter were fighting for the Confederacy.
This is not correct. It is not illegal to be a member of, or recruit for, Atomwaffen. Its illegal to commit crimes. But associating with a group isn't a crime (for good reason!). That doesn't mean that we shouldn't take steps to keep people from associating with people who will cause them to commit crime.
Or like, should we just go whole hog and encourage MS-13 to post recruitment videos on youtube too.
As for salafism, no that's akin to something like the WBC, which while reasonably considered a hate group, hasn't been banned from anywhere as far as I know.