The modern Identitarian movement was launched in France in 2012 with the founding of Generation Identitaire, an offshoot of the white nationalist Bloc Identitaire. There are now GI chapters in several countries.

Known for provocative anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant actions and a youthful, hipster style, the group’s first major public act was to occupy the largest mosque in Poitiers to denounce “the Islamization of France.” Also in 2012, the French branch of GI posted a slickly produced video on YouTube titled “A Declaration of War from The Generation of National Identity.” Featuring a series of young white people decrying multiculturalism and democracy, the video made clear the group’s racist and anti-immigrant views.

“We are the generation of ethnic fracture, total failure of coexistence and forced mixing of the races… our heritage is our land, our blood, our identity,” reads the video’s subtitles. It ends with “don’t think this is a manifesto, this is a declaration of war.” In its many postings, the video has had tens of thousands of views worldwide.

Identitarians are best known for their anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant publicity stunts, similar to the Poitiers mosque occupation. A classic example was staged by Italian members of GI who, in 2016, scaled a monument to the Italian opera composer Donizetti in Bergamo, stuck a poster on it with the inscription “Islam in Europe—2050,” then covered the statue with a niqab. That same year in Austria, adherents of that branch of GI covered a statue of the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa with a giant burqa.

The movement is strongly opposed to Muslims and Islam and argues for a new Reconquest of Europe, or Reconquista, the 700-year period in which Christians violently expelled Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. Followers complain of an “Islamization” of Europe through mass immigration, which they view as a threat to European culture and society. Among other things, Identitarians in France have called for freezing of legal immigration, reestablishment of borders, stopping the construction of new mosques, and outlawing of Islamist organizations. Identitarians also accuse their governments of importing terror by allowing Muslims to immigrate.

Identitarian thinking has metastasized across broad swaths of the West, becoming a worldwide movement that advances the idea that a global elite is conspiring to cause white people to be wiped out in their historic homelands, and that immigrants and refugees need to be repatriated to their countries of origin to stop the so-called Great Replacement. Pierre Vial, an intellectual prized by many Identitarians who runs an Identitarian-like cultural group called Land and People, says the Great Replacement is a “racial invasion of Europe” leading to “all the conditions of a racial war, which will be the war of the XXI century. A war that is under way.” He adds this will be a war “that we will wage in the name of a very simple reminder addressed at the invaders: the suitcase or the coffin.” A key German activist, Markus Willinger, has crudely said, “We don’t want Mehmed and Mustapha to become Europeans.”

In this context, violence shouldn’t be a surprise. Not only has there been terrorism connected to these ideas, but hate crimes against mosques and Muslims in European countries have also risen in recent years. As researchers at Hope Not Hate wrote in 2019, “Despite often preaching non-violence, there is nothing stopping Identitarianism’s followers believing violence is the only feasible response to this alarmist rhetoric.”

By ignoring this issue, Facebook for years allowed the most dangerous white supremacist propaganda to fester and grow, recruiting untold numbers of people into the ranks of a movement that has inspired violence and genocide targeting Muslims, immigrants, and Jews. The Christchurch shooter had been radicalized into Identitarianism, spread on multiple Facebook accounts, and was an adherent of the racist Great Replacement theory – an international white supremacist conspiracy movement that promotes the idea that white people are slowly experiencing a genocide in their own home countries due to a plot by elites to displace white people with rising numbers of non-white immigrants. The Great Replacement theory argues that immigrants, especially Muslims, are destroying Western countries and turning them into foreign places. These thinkers often argue disparagingly that Europe is becoming Eurabia.

The New Zealand shooter was clear about his motive. In his manifesto, Brenton Tarrant wrote that he wanted to stop the Great Replacement, and he targeted Muslims, including their children, for extermination. As Peter Lentini has written, “Tarrant’s solution to the crisis [posed by a Muslim “invasion”] – indeed one on which he felt compelled to enact – was to annihilate his enemies (read Muslim immigrants). This included targeting non-combatants. In one point, he indicates that [immigrants] constitute a much greater threat to the future of Western societies than terrorists and combatants. Thus, he argues that it is also necessary to kill children to ensure that the enemy line will not continue.”

Generation Identity (GI), the sprawling, international organization that pushes the Great Replacement idea, was rampant on Facebook for years. In June 2018, Facebook finally took action against GI, but only after several members of the Austrian chapter were investigated for potentially running a criminal organization (the investigation ended without charges). Facebook deplatformed the entire network citing violations of policy. But this was too little, too late. Before being blocked, more than 120,000 people followed Generation Identity on Facebook. Facebook is complicit in the worldwide transmission of Identitarian thinking, which is anti-Muslim at its heart. Since October 2018, there have been at least six mass attacks motivated by Great Replacement ideology.

In addition to Christchurch, attacks were staged at two American synagogues, an El Paso Walmart, a synagogue in Halle, Germany, and two shisha bars in Hanau, Germany. Two of these mass shootings specifically targeted Muslims, in Hanau and Christchurch, but all were directed against immigrants or Jews who were seen as abetting non-white immigration. Anders Breivik, who in 2012 murdered dozens of children in Norway because he believed they would grow up to become adult supporters of Muslim immigrants to the country, actively promoted his ideas on Facebook before the attack.

Unfortunately, there is little public awareness regarding Facebook’s role as a chief driver of anti-Muslim hate and violence throughout the world. Even more disturbing, the company chose repeatedly over years not to act in the face of overwhelming evidence that material posted to Facebook was likely to end in violence. The following summary describes Facebook’s role in the deaths of thousands of Muslims in multiple countries. These examples not only illustrate Facebook’s complicity but also demonstrate how profoundly hate content can impact people’s lives and cause violence offline.

What’s documented here is illustrative of the problem with anti-Muslim hate on the platform, but likely represents just the tip of the iceberg, and is by no means exhaustive, as information about Facebook’s role in dozens of countries and/or anti-Muslim incidents remains patchy, or unexamined, or nonexistent. Given the widespread nature of anti-Muslim hate on the platform, it is very likely that millions of Muslims around the world have been impacted negatively, jeopardizing their safety and their freedom, by Facebook’s failure to act on anti-Muslim hate speech.

Sparked by online rumors that a man was killed defending a woman from rape by a Muslim refugee, riots targeting Muslim refugees and immigrants broke out in August of 2018, starting in the state of Saxony. The Facebook account of the municipal political party, Pro-Chemnitz, pushed the misinformation and organized the protest that ended in mob violence. In calling for the protest, it claimed the victim in the rumored stabbing was “a brave helper who lost his life trying to protect a woman.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested the violence was a threat to Germany’s post-war constitution, saying, “We have video footage of the fact that there was [hunting people down], there were riots, there was hatred on the streets, and that has nothing to do with our constitutional state.”

In another incident, a teenaged Syrian refugee, Anas Modamani, took a selfie with Chancellor Angela Merkel that he posted on Facebook. After terrorist attacks in Brussels and Berlin in 2016, Modamani’s selfie began appearing on Facebook, this time doctored to falsely label him as one of the perpetrators of the attacks. Afraid of being recognized, Modamani was afraid to leave his home. Chan-jo Jun, a lawyer, brought a landmark lawsuit against Facebook on behalf of Modamani for being smeared online. His litigation was unsuccessful, but it helped lead Germany to pass one of the world’s most aggressive laws targeting online hate speech, the so-called NetzDG law.

But the damage was already done. The rumors helped support the growth of the anti-Muslim Alternative for Germany party, which would eventually be elected to seats in several German state parliaments. The AfD now has over 500,000 followers on Facebook. Research in 2018 by academics at the University of Warwick specifically showed that thousands of hate-filled Facebook posts were linked to an increase in racially-motivated attacks on refugees in Germany, who are predominantly Muslim. The research specifically cited material from the AfD as fueling this awful trend. Now, anti-Muslim and anti-refugee sentiment is widespread among sectors of the German population. In 2019, there were more than 800 attacks on Muslims in Germany.

The situation is so dire regarding the anti-Muslim bias of Facebook India that the company’s senior executives were summoned before a parliamentary committee for a closed door hearing on September 2, 2020. The committee hearing followed allegations that the company’s top policy official in India, Ankhi Das, had prevented the removal of hate speech and anti-Muslim posts by ruling party Bharatiya Janata (BJP) politicians in order to protect and promote the Hindu nationalist party and its Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who have advanced anti-Muslim policies.

Ties between the company and the BJP are deep. Both Zuckerberg and Sandberg have met personally with Modi, who is the most popular world leader on Facebook. Before becoming prime minister, Zuckerberg even introduced his parents to Modi, a strange choice considering Modi’s horrific track record of stoking violence against Muslims. In February 2002, while head of the Gujarat government, Modi allegedly encouraged massive anti-Muslim riots. As the state was overcome with violence and over a thousand Muslims were murdered, leaders of the BJP and its even more nationalist ally, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, gave speeches provoking Hindus to teach Muslims a lesson. Modi himself gave an incendiary speech, mocking riot victims and calling relief camps for Muslims “child-producing factories.” The intensity and brutality of the violence unleashed against Muslims in 2002 led the Supreme Court of India to describe the Modi government in Gujarat as, “Modern day Neros who looked the other way while young women and children were burnt alive.”

Das’ inability to carry out her responsibilities in an objective manner manifests itself in many different situations. When T. Raja Singh, another member of the BJP, called for the slaughter of Rohingya Muslim refugees, threatened to demolish mosques, and labeled Indian Muslim citizens as traitors, Facebook’s online security staff determined his account should be banned for not only violating its community standards, but also for falling under the category of “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations.” Das stepped in to protect Singh from punitive action, because “punishing violations by politicians from Mr. Modi’s party would damage the company’s business prospects in the country,” according to Facebook employees. Outrage in response to these disclosures forced Facebook to finally ban Singh from the platform in early September 2020. Lynchings spurred by bigoted and propagandistic WhatsApp posts led the company to consider banning mass messaging on the system.

India is Facebook’s largest and most lucrative market with nearly 350 million users and another 400 million on WhatsApp. The BJP, which has more than 16 million followers on its page, is Facebook India’s biggest advertising spender in recent months. Facebook has multiple commercial ties with the Indian government, including partnerships with the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, the Ministry of Women, and the Board of Education.

There are many more connections between anti-Muslim content on Facebook and violence in India. In May 2020, a BJP member of parliament in West Bengal, Arjun Singh, posted an image on Facebook that he wrongly claimed was a depiction of a Hindu who had been brutalized by Muslim mobs. It was captioned: “How long will the blood of Hindus flow on in Bengal…we will not stay quiet if they [Muslims] attack ordinary people.” Four hours later, an angry mob of about 100 Hindus descended on a town in West Bengal and a Muslim shrine was vandalized. Facebook failed to remove the posts until after the company experienced backlash as a result of the violent attacks, which local Muslims alleged had been incited by Singh’s post. Overall, dozens of Muslims have been lynched since 2012 by vigilantes, with many of the incidents triggered by fake news regarding cow slaughter or smuggling shared on WhatsApp.

Human rights organizations, including the Indian American Muslim Council, South Asians Building Accountability & Healing, and the Coalition to Stop Genocide in India (made up of dozens of organizations in the U.S. and other countries) assert that Facebook simply refuses to remove anti-Muslim hate content in India and have requested an investigation by the United States Congress. In September of 2020, a letter signed by 41 civil rights organizations from around the world called on Facebook to put an end to anti- Muslim hate on its platform and immediately suspend Das, among other requests, to protect the safety and security of Muslims.

Facebook’s anti-Muslim actions in India have been repeatedly called out by civil society actors. In October 2019, a report by the nonprofit organization Avaaz accused Facebook of having become a “megaphone for hate” against Muslims in the northeastern Indian state of Assam — where nearly two million people, many of them Muslims, have been stripped of their citizenship by the BJP government. Another report, by the South Asian human rights group Equality Labs, found “Islamophobic [anti-Muslim] content was the biggest source of hate speech on Facebook in India, accounting for 37 percent of the content,” and that 93 percent of the hate speech they reported to Facebook was not removed. They also reported on how Facebook is being used to spread hate speech and misinformation accusing Muslims of deliberately infecting non-Muslims and Hindus with COVID-19, again contributing to potential violence against Muslims. Meanwhile, as the Modi government was stripping Muslims of their rights, Facebook was taking WhatsApp accounts away from Muslims in Kashmir.

The government had suspended Internet in the region to prevent communication and Facebook’s policy automatically discontinues WhatsApp participation after 120 days. As a result, the government prevented Muslims in the region from organizing, and Facebook contributed by further reducing communication opportunities.

In late August, a group of 54 former Indian bureaucrats wrote to Zuckerberg asking the company to perform an audit of how Facebook’s hate speech policy is applied and to do so without Das’ involvement. The letter pointed to the financial aspects of Facebook’s situation in India causing a conflict of interest. “That this (not censoring hate speech by members of the BJP) seems to have been done to protect Facebook’s commercial interests is even more reprehensible… We note that such behavior on Facebook’s part has become a subject of debate in other countries as well. Commercial interests at the cost of human lives? If these are the crass calculations Facebook indulges in, it is no surprise that the calculus of hate is spreading like a virus in many parts of the world,” the letter read.

Many, however, question the utility of continuing to urge Facebook to address hate on the platform driven by the BJP and other Hindu nationalist organizations in India. Malay Tewari, a Kolkata-based activist, argued Facebook “rarely” responded to his complaints about BJP-linked posts and “quite strangely, Facebook posts which expose the propaganda or hate campaign of the BJP, which do not violate community standards, are often removed.” Indian journalist Rana Ayyub agreed saying, “For years now, verified Facebook pages of BJP leaders such as Kapil Mishra have routinely published hate speeches against Muslims and dissenting voices. The hate then translates into deadly violence, such as the February anti-Muslim attacks in Delhi that left many people dead in some of the worst communal violence India’s capital has seen in decades… It’s clear that Facebook has no intention of holding hatemongers accountable and that the safety of users is not a priority.”

In late August, it was reported that Facebook, in an effort to evaluate its role in spreading hate speech and incitements to violence, had commissioned an independent report by the U.S. law firm Foley Hoag LLP on the platform’s impact on human rights in India. Work on the India audit, previously unknown, began before political bias in Facebook’s India operations was documented by journalists in August and September of 2020. Additionally, the new Facebook Oversight Board has indicated that it may step into the India situation. The board has said that it has the authority to decide “how Facebook treats posts from public figures that may violate community standards,” including against hate speech and that it “won’t shy away from the tough cases and holding Facebook accountable.” One can only hope that the Oversight Board will honor this commitment.

It took until August 2018 – a year after 25,000 Rohingya were killed and 700,000 fled Myanmar– for Facebook to ban Tatmadaw (military) leaders from its platform (only to return in June of 2020). Facing growing public pressure, the company also commissioned and published an independent Human Rights Impact Assessment on the role its services were playing in the country and committed to hiring 100 native Burmese speakers as content moderators. Prior to deplatforming Tatmadow, Facebook banned four armed ethnic groups in the country, but not the Tatmadaw, presumably because they are state actors. Repeated requests for comment from Facebook on why some ethnic groups were banned while a state actor engaged in ethnic violence was not, went unanswered.

This, even though the 2018 U.N. fact-finding report had noted that “actions of the Tatmadaw in both Kachin and Shan States since 2011 amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.” Facebook has yet to impose across-the-board bans on military-run accounts of the kind applied to the four minority rebel groups. Instead, it seems to be taking a deeply statist approach toward these groups, thereby helping an army that stands accused of genocide.

A U.N. fact-finding mission was shocked by Facebook’s lack of action and found the company played a “determining role” in stirring up hatred against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. The chairman of the U.N. mission, Marzuki Darusman, said that social media had “substantively contributed to the level of acrimony amongst the wider public against Rohingya Muslims… Hate speech is certainly, of course, a part of that.” Yanghee Lee, Special Rapporteur for human rights violations in Myanmar said, “I’m afraid that Facebook has now turned into a beast, and not what it originally intended.”

Facebook leadership has admitted its complicity in these events. Zuckerberg said in 2018 that Facebook needed to improve in Myanmar, though that admission came much too late for critics who said he failed to adequately take responsibility for what had been a long-term issue. The company announced in July of that year that it would expand its efforts to remove material worldwide that could incite violence. In a surprising concession before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee in September 2018, Sandberg called the events in Myanmar “devastating” and acknowledged the company had to do more, highlighting that Facebook had put increased resources behind being able to review content in Burmese. She also accepted that Facebook had a moral and legal obligation to take down accounts that incentivize violence in countries like Myanmar (even so, two years later, Facebook continues to leave these kinds of accounts up, including in countries like India where violence against Muslims has been serious).

The last words of Haji-Daoud Nabi before he and his 50 fellow worshipers were gunned down in Christchurch, New Zealand was the welcoming phrase, “Hello, brother.” On March 15, 2019, in a performance for Facebook Live, Brenton Tarrant slaughtered worshipers at two different mosques in one of the deadliest white supremacist attacks in recent history. The 17-minute long Facebook live- stream broadcast went viral; in the 24 hours following the attack, attempts were made to re-upload the footage 1.5 million times while Facebook scrambled to stop its spread. The video of the attack was cross-posted across various social networks, and links to the live-stream and Tarrant’s manifesto were posted on the unregulated message board 8chan.

The New Zealand shooter was clear about his anti-Muslim motive. In his manifesto, Tarrant, who was in touch with members of the anti-Muslim, white supremacist and transnational Generation Identity movement, wrote that he wanted to stop the Great Replacement, and he targeted Muslims, including their children, for extermination. As Peter Lentini has written, “Tarrant’s solution to the crisis [posed by a Muslim “invasion”] – indeed one on which he felt compelled to enact – was to annihilate his enemies (read Muslim immigrants). This included targeting non-combatants. In one point, he indicates that [immigrants] constitute a much greater threat to the future of Western societies than terrorists and combatants. Thus, he argues that it is also necessary to kill children to ensure that the enemy line will not continue.”

Tarrant may have first been exposed to the ideology that propelled his attack because it was circulated widely on Facebook for many, many years. The shooter had been radicalized into the white supremacist Identitarian movement and was an adherent of the racist Great Replacement theory – an international white supremacist conspiracy that promotes the idea that white people are slowly experiencing a genocide in their own home countries due to a plot by elites to displace them with rising numbers of non- white immigrants. This racist thinking is most prominently recognized in the form of the sprawling, multinational organization, Generation Identity, to which Tarrant gave a donation. For years, GI material flourished on Facebook and garnered many thousands of followers until the movement was deplatformed in 2018. Even after the deplatforming, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue identified some 11,000 members of Facebook groups devoted to the Great Replacement idea.

In late August 2020, far-right Danish politician Rasmus Paludan, head of the Stram Kurs (Hard Line) anti-immigrant party, tried to cross over the bridge from Denmark into Malmo, Sweden, for a Quran burning event with his anti-Muslim allies. He was turned away by Swedish authorities on the bridge and barred from Sweden for two years. Paludan responded with an angry, anti-Muslim message on Facebook: “Sent back and banned from Sweden for two years. However, rapists and murderers are always welcome!”

Despite Paludan’s absence, his supporters moved forward with their protest and burned a Quran near a Malmo mosque. Riots broke out resulting in significant property destruction, all of which was propelled by social media videos of the desecration that were circulated widely online. Paludan, who has an active Facebook page full of anti-Muslim videos, was sentenced to a month in jail in Denmark for a string of offences, including racism, in early 2020. His conviction included charges regarding posting anti-Muslim videos on social media channels. Paludan’s Facebook page remained active as of September 2020.

The problem with anti-Muslim hate on Facebook has been widely documented for years. An analysis of Facebook data in early 2020 showed that the United States and Australia “lead in the number of active Facebook pages and groups dedicated to referring this dehumanizing [anti-Muslim] content.” In May 2020, the Tech Transparency Project found more than 100 American white supremacist groups, many of them explicitly anti-Muslim, active on the platform both on their own group pages as well as on auto-generated content. In the wake of TTP’s report, Facebook did nominally alter some of the auto-generated content, but the hate groups largely remained.

An analysis by computer scientist Megan Squire of far-right groups on Facebook found a significant crossover with anti-Muslim hate. Squire found that anti-Muslim attitudes are not only flourishing on the platform, but also acting as a “common denominator” for a range of other extremist ideologies, including xenophobic anti-immigrant groups, pro-Confederate groups, militant anti-government conspiracy theorists, and white nationalists. Squire said of her research, “Some of the anti-Muslim groups are central players in the hate network as a whole. And the anti-Muslim groups show more membership crossover with other ideologies than I expected.”

A 2018 study by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) identified 33 anti-Muslim Facebook groups that used violent imagery, including weapons, in their main photos. According to the SPLC, twenty of these groups promoted the stereotype that all Muslims are violent. One group, “Islam Unveiled,” had an image of an ISIS fighter executing prisoners lying prone in a shallow grave. The picture was accompanied by a quote credited to “Muhammad, Prophet of Islam,” which says, “Killing Unbelievers is a SMALL MATTER to us.” The SPLC also found a group, “PRO-ISLAMOPHOBIA SAVES LIVES!!” whose cover photo was an image of a charred, blackened body which should have been prohibited according to Facebook’s claim that posts depicting “charred or burning people” are prohibited. After an academic researcher flagged the group, an automated response was generated and provided to SPLC: “We looked over the group you reported and though it doesn’t go against one of our specific Community Standards, we understand that the group or something shared in it may still be offensive to you.”

There are other ways anti-Muslim material is spread on Facebook. In 2019, a major study found dozens of current and former American law enforcement officers as members of Facebook groups dedicated to anti-Muslim bigotry. Many were private groups, where this hatred was allowed to flourish outside of any oversight. With names such as “Veterans Against islamic Filth,” “PURGE WORLDWIDE (The Cure for the Islamic disease in your country)” and “Americans Against Mosques,” these groups serve as private forums to share bigoted messages about Muslims, and they have proven attractive to police officers.

Facebook’s problem with anti-Muslim content was also documented by its own civil rights audit, which came after years of pressure from human rights advocates to address hate content online. Released in July 2020, the auditors singled out the problem of anti-Muslim hate as needing to be addressed, their conclusions were partly based on information provided by human rights groups who had been lobbying the company for years to take the problem seriously. Facebook has, thus far, not addressed any of the anti-Muslim problems found by its own audit. The company’s actions indicate that its decision to engage in the audit at all was not out of concern for lives lost because of its inaction, but for political expediency.

Perhaps the most notable case of allowing anti-Muslim hate speech on Facebook, despite it violating the site’s rules, involves President Donald Trump. In 2016, Zuckerberg decided not to remove a post by Trump calling for a ban of all Muslims entering the U.S. Zuckerberg acknowledged in a meeting with his staff that Trump’s call for a ban did qualify as hate speech, but said the implications of removing them were too drastic. Once again, Facebook refused to apply its hate speech policies against a politically powerful individual.

Facebook’s event pages have been particularly problematic. For years, white nationalists, militias, and anti-Muslim hate groups have been using Facebook event pages to organize armed, hate rallies targeting mosques and Muslim community centers across the country. Shockingly, the company permitted white nationalist militias to directly intimidate worshippers and threaten mosques. In 2016, two Russian Facebook pages organized dueling rallies in front of the Islamic Da’wah Center of Houston. Heart of Texas, a Russian-controlled Facebook group that promoted Texas secession, played into the stereotype of the state as a land of guns and barbecue and amassed hundreds of thousands of followers. One of their ads on Facebook announced a noon rally on May 21, 2016 to “Stop Islamification of Texas.” A separate Russian-sponsored group, United Muslims of America (stealing the identity of a legitimate California-based Muslim organization), advertised a “Save Islamic Knowledge” rally for the same place and time. The armed protest was peaceful but terrorized those inside the religious center.

Facebook’s civil rights auditors highlighted the company’s failure to enforce policies prohibiting a call to arms during an anti-Muslim protest organized on their events pages during August of 2019. The auditors described an event page which was used to intimidate attendees of the Islamic Society of North America’s annual convention in Houston, Texas. Despite the fact that this was the second year in a row where this same hate group threatened the conference, it took Facebook more than 24 hours to remove the event page. Facebook did later acknowledge that the Houston incident represented an enforcement misstep, and the auditors used this example to conclude that Facebook’s “events policy provides another illustration of the need for focused study and analysis on particular manifestations of hate.”

In its August 2020 update of its hate speech policies, which banned conspiracy theories and stereotypes targeting vulnerable communities, Facebook yet again left Muslims off the list. This was just another example in a long line of disappointing decisions made by the company, particularly given the conclusions of Facebook’s own audit released the month prior that highlighted the significant problem of anti-Muslim hate on the platform. From the documentation in this report of international anti-Muslim violence stoked on Facebook, it seems clear that Facebook has no regard for the lives of Muslims. The August 2020 policy changes banning blackface and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and stereotypes are clearly welcome and important expansions of the company’s hate speech policies. It is baffling, however, that the company chose not to include implicit stereotypes and tropes about Muslims, such as the false ideas that they are inherently violent, foreign, or criminal. These stereotypes are all dangerous and have resulted in discrimination, hate crimes, and mass murder of Muslims around the world. Yet, given the many opportunities and repeated warnings over many years to protect Muslims from hate content on its platform, the company has refused to act. Ultimately, one thing is clear: for Facebook, jeopardizing the safety and security of Muslims is just the cost of doing business.