Facebook announced Wednesday that it intends to ban content that glorifies white nationalism and separatism, a major policy shift that will begin next week... Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the National Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, tells NPR that "[f]or too long, Facebook has maintained a policy that carved out an indefensible distinction between white supremacy and white nationalism and white separatism, and that carve-out allowed violent white supremacists to openly exploit the platform to incite violence across the country and frankly across the globe."

... Vera Eidelman, staff attorney with the ACLU [ said], "White supremacist, nationalist and separatist views are repugnant, and Facebook as a private company is well within its rights to remove such hate and bigotry from its platform. Indeed, any content that crosses the line into incitement or true threats is not protected speech... [however] Facebook runs the risk of censoring those that attack white nationalism, too... every time Facebook makes the choice to remove content, a single company is exercising an unchecked power to silence individuals and remove them from what has become an indispensable platform... For the same reason that the Constitution prevents the government from exercising such power, we should be wary of encouraging its exercise by corporations that are answerable to their private shareholders rather than the broader public interest."