Fraser Anning Has Been Banned From Facebook For Hate Speech

Katter’s Australian Party senator and bigoted idiot Fraser Anning is now banned from Facebook, and honestly, good riddance.

You may remember Anning as the absolute deadshit who used his maiden speech to Federal Parliament to compare Muslims to “poison jelly beans”, praise the White Australia policy, and call for a “final solution to the immigration problem”. Yesterday, he uploaded a video to his social media channels where he spouted more anti-Muslim bullshit, describing people of Muslim faith as “not compatible with our Western way of life” and calling for a total ban on Muslim immigration.

Now, it looks like Facebook’s had enough: Anning’s page disappeared from the platform today, and no longer appears in searches. Trying to access the page directly at its former URL yields an error message.

Meanwhile, people who have previously reported Anning’s videos for hate speech have received a message from Facebook support which says that “since the Page where the video appeared goes against our Community Standards, we removed both the Page and all its posts”.

Fwee Speech! Democwacee! etc etc – well, at least Senator Fraser Anning still has parliamentary privilege under which to spin his racist bin fire. pic.twitter.com/qIjp82kbYx

— Pauline Pantsdown (@PPantsdown) September 28, 2018

Fraser Anning has also tweeted to confirm his page was unpublished by Facebook, sharing a screenshot of a message to him from Facebook informing him that “recent activity on your Page doesn’t follow the Facebook Pages Terms”. “Free speech is under attack, and communication is being regulated by foreign companies with tendencies of political bias,” he wrote on Twitter, where he is not currently banned. “This is completely unacceptable and we will fight this.”

Facebook has just taken the unprecedented step in unpublishing a Commonwealth Politicians page. Free speech is under attack, and communication is being regulated by foreign companies with tendencies of political bias. This is completely unacceptable and we will fight this. pic.twitter.com/J81lkECREP

— Senator Fraser Anning (@fraser_anning) September 28, 2018

The removal of Anning’s page follows Facebook’s decision to ban far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from its platform last month. In a statement at the time, Facebook confirmed that “we have taken [the page] down for glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanising language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies. All four Pages have been unpublished for repeated violations of Community Standards and accumulating too many strikes.”

It’s unclear at this stage whether Fraser Anning’s Facebook ban is similarly permanent, or if he’ll be back to accumulate more strikes in future. We’ve reached out to Facebook to find out, and we’ll update this post when we hear back.