Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg took to his social network Wednesday to condemn white supremacists and pledged to remove violent threats and posts celebrating hate crimes.
“The last few days have been hard to process,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page Wednesday evening, days after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, turned deadly. “As a Jew, it’s something I’ve wondered much of my life. It’s a disgrace that we still need to say that neo-Nazis and white supremacists are wrong — as if this is somehow not obvious. My thoughts are with the victims of hate around the world, and everyone who has the courage to stand up to it every day.”
Zuckerberg’s comments come amid a wave of action by technology companies to more assertively police controversial speech. This week, for example, both GoDaddy and Google blacklisted the neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer. And Facebook said it had begun “actively removing any posts” celebrating the killing on Saturday of Heather Heyer, who died when a suspected white supremacists ran his car over counterprotesters. The social network also removed several pages devoted to white nationalism, according to BuzzFeed. PayPal said Tuesday it would shut off its services to groups like the KKK, cutting off what the Southern Poverty Law Center has called “the banking system for white nationalism.”