As a Canadian I would be horrified if they banned all speech related to separatism. Quebec should absolutely be entitled to rant about wanting to separate themselves from the rest of Canada. That's not extremist speech, there is no realistic risk of violence from that speech, it's just a widely held (slightly less so recently) political opinion about how we should organize ourselves into political bodies.
I don't know what issues Spain has with separatism, maybe there are some legitimate ones, but not all separatist groups are inherently bad.
You'll be disappointed here. They are specifically targeting white nationalism/separatism. They specifically exclude other types in the article.
> We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism – things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
So separatism is only bad if it targets non-whites?
So when Basques and Catalans say they want to leave because the rest of the country, especially the south, is full of half-moorish lazy fucks, that is cool.
Guess the same about the two halves of Italy.
I don't care as I don't use Facebook, but it's a double standard.
> So separatism is only bad if it targets non-whites?
I can't speak for Facebook, and I'm not super with-it on the conflicts in Spain, but it seems like they're making the distinction between "we want our own country" and "we want our own country and we want to violently purge everyone else from it".
But they don't say that, and if they did, you certainly wouldn't need any new policies to ban them. There are the 8chan lunatics, but outside that there are a wide range of views on what the white nationalist end-goal is and how to achieve it.
I'm reminded of the Sargon v Richard Spencer debate here. Sargon's line of attack was essentially this: You advocate for an ethnostate, people will not react well to the non-violent policies you publicly advocate to bring this about, thus there will be violence, therefore your rhetoric is violent. Even if you approve this line of reasoning, you have to admit that it can be applied to any separatist movement anywhere in the world.
Nor should they. I helped run a large, active web forum for years. We found general rules and moderator discretion were far more valuable than a list of 800 different "you can't do foo" specific rules, because the bad actors tie up all your time lawyering about the specifics.
As long as you're admitting that there's no general principle being evenly applied here, and it is entirely discretionary on Facebook's part, we have an understanding.
e: But it's not an arbitrary exercise of power when I do it!
"Race" is a de-facto cultural category, at least in the U.S. It's not merely a description of someone's outward appearance; the reason people even care about the construct in the first place is its social aspects, which happen to be rather pervasive. It's not obviously wrong to advocate for separatism on the basis of such things, nor is separatism per se hateful or violent.
Except you can't, which is why for example "Islamophobia" is a thing. Things that should be ideologically separate are inevitably tied back to race/ethnicity, because nobody seems to know how to separate race/ethnicity from ideology in debate. Just listen to how much flak Sam Harris gets on the subject.
I don't know what issues Spain has with separatism, maybe there are some legitimate ones, but not all separatist groups are inherently bad.