According to Facebook’s rules, there are protected categories—like sex, gender identity, race and religious affiliation—and non-protected categories—like social class, occupation, appearance, and age. If speech refers to the former, it’s hate speech; if it’s refers to the latter, it’s not. So, “we should murder all the Muslims” is hate speech. “We should murder all the poor people” is not.
This binary designation might make some uncomfortable, but it’s when protected and unprotected classes get linked together in a sentence—a compound category—that Facebook’s policies become extra strange. Facebook’s logic dictates the following:
Protected category + Protected category = Protected category
Protected category + Unprotected category =Unprotected
To illustrate this, Facebook’s training materials provide three examples—“white men”, “female drivers”, and “black children”—and states that only the first of these is protected from hate speech. The answer is “white men.” Why? Because “white” + “male” = protected class + protected class, and thus, the resulting class of people protected. Counterintuitively, because “black” (a protected class) modifies “children” (not protected), the group is unprotected.
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