According to a report from Vice’s Motherboard, rapper Lil B—a.k.a. TheBasedGod—has been temporarily banned from Facebook for violating the site’s policies on hate speech, with the offending posts quickly being removed by Facebook. On Twitter, Lil B explained that he was for “talking about white people,” and the Motherboard post notes that a number of black activists have also recently been banned for making statements about white people on Facebook. Now, after some predictable backlash to the ban, Lil B has shared the posts in question:
Facebook is also commenting on the ban now, explaining that it will last for 30 days and that it comes from “at least five violations” of the site’s policies (though Lil B says he was only notified of two). As for why this violated the policies in the first place, a Facebook spokesperson defends the decision by suggesting it would be clearer “if you were to change ‘white’ to something else, like ‘black people are the problem, they’re so violent.’” The spokesperson also adds that the site’s hate speech policies “apply equally to all races” and are “race-neutral.”
Of course, anyone who has ever been on Facebook can tell you that it doesn’t really work like that, and Motherboard presented Facebook with a number of posts that would seem to violate the policy but somehow don’t. The spokesperson said that she would have to run specific posts by the community operations team, but she guessed that a lot of seemingly racist content on Facebook isn’t obvious enough to be flagged.