In a move that Facebook Inc. calls “Standing Against Hate,” the social network today said it’s in the process of expunging all content relating to white nationalism or separatism.

The move comes two weeks after 50 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, were killed in a mosque shooting – something which to the concern of many appeared on Facebook Live and also as a copied video in the news feed.

In a blog post published Wednesday, Facebook said there was no place for such content on any of its services, including Instagram, and that the process of removal will begin next week. The company said that while it has always made hateful content verboten on Facebook, as well as white supremacism, white nationalism and separatism remained because it wasn’t always explicitly hateful.

“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,” said Facebook.

The company now says that after a few months of research and reaching out to academics and experts in race relations, it concluded that white nationalism and separatism can’t be separated from supremacist views and often contain hate speech.

Social media and the media in general have come under attack after the New Zealand shooting, with critics saying such extremists have their views fomented by the proliferation of anti-Muslim content that appears on their channels. Many critics said social media has a cross to bear for its part in such extremism.

No doubt this caused ripples at Facebook, and since the attacks, the company said, it’s trying it improve its algorithm to spot hate speech and take it down faster. Now it seems the net has widened somewhat. Facebook also said it will try to redirect people searching for extremist content to a better place.

“People searching for these terms will be directed to Life After Hate, an organization founded by former violent extremists that provides crisis intervention, education, support groups and outreach,” said the company.

Facebook has gained mostly plaudits for the move, although others have asked the question of when white pride becomes dangerous speech. “Is talking about ‘white people issues’ now forbidden?” tweeted entrepreneur Jeff Giesea. “How long can we sustain today’s asymmetry in identity politics?” Facebook did say that “pride in their ethnic heritage” is OK, but there is a line that can be crossed.

Facebook admitted that it’s not always easy to determine what content is tantamount to hate speech and said it will have to rely on human moderators to make that decision once a post, video, image, comment, page or group, has been flagged by another user. If such content is deemed hateful, Facebook said it will remove the post or comment but won’t necessarily ban the messenger.

Photo: Robert Thivierge/Flickr