Facebook’s Ban List Leaked: Mostly Far-right Orgs, Websites, and Bands from Hungary

Hungary Today 2021.10.13.

26 Hungarian names can be found on Facebook’s recently-leaked list of banned entities that includes well over 4,000 individuals and organizations falling into categories such as hate, crime, terrorism, militarized social movements, and violent non-state actors. Notorious far-right portal kuruc.info, far-right party Mi Hazánk-linked Sixty-Four Counties Youth Movement, and several music bands were all featured on the blacklist published by The Intercept.

How does Facebook’s banning policy work, according to the company itself?

Users who discuss these individuals or groups may end up penalized by the social network’s moderators according to a three-tiered system that Facebook announced in June. Any individual or group on any of the tiers is banned.

Fact

According to Gizmodo’s summary:

Tier 1 includes those who cause “serious offline harm,” such as organizing violence against civilians, advocating for harm based on protected characteristics, or involvement in organized crime. Facebook removes “praise, substantive support, and representation” of Tier 1 groups and figures, as well as “violating violent events” that might be committed by them. This tier includes terrorists.
Tier 2 includes “Violent Non-State Actors” such as armed rebels in the Syrian Civil War, for which Facebook will allow limited praise for nonviolent actions but remove “all substantive support and representation” or “any praise of these groups’ violent activities.”
Tier 3 is the least severe and faces the fewest restrictions. It is comprised of entities Facebook has determined violate its policies on hate speech and dangerous organizations, or demonstrate an intent to “commit offline violence” on a foreseeable timeline, but who “have not necessarily engaged in violence to date or advocated for violence against others based on their protected characteristics.”

Gizmodo also notes that the blacklist, called Dangerous Individuals and Organizations (DIO), appears to mirror the interests of the U.S. government and military.

Hungarians on the list: mostly extreme far-righters

Sixty-Four Counties Youth Movement (HVIM) is perhaps the most well-known Hungarian entity on the list. The group, whose name refers to pre-Trianon Hungary’s 64 counties, also have links to former Jobbik politicians’ far-right Mi Hazánk party and is also known for holding several demonstrations, among them violent ones too.

Kuruc.info– a far-right news portal with openly anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying, and racist content- is also on the list.

This just adds to several far-right music bands, such as Archívum, Divízió 88, Egészséges Fejbőr (Healthy Headskin), Nimród, Oi-Kor, Arbeit Macht Frei, Romantikus Erőszak (Romantic Violence), and Titkolt Ellenállás (Secret Resistance).

All the Hungarian names subject to the ban, actually belong to the third, least severe category.

featured image illustration via Zsolt Szigetváry/MTI