Facebook shuts down pages affiliated with Richard Spencer

Facebook has taken down two pages associated with the white supremacist Richard Spencer, Vice reported.

The two pages belonged to Spencer’s National Policy Institute and his website altright.com.

Facebook confirmed to BuzzFeed that the pages were shut down and said Facebook does not allow hate groups on their site.

Links to both pages — which had less than 15,000 followers total — display error messages.

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The move comes in the same week that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress about his company’s privacy policies and the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal.

During the hearings, Zuckerberg noted that Facebook does not support hate groups using their platform.

“We do not allow hate groups on Facebook, overall. So if there’s a group that their primary purpose, or a large part of what they do, is spreading hate, we will ban them from the platform overall,” he said.

Spencer is one of the most prominent white nationalists in the U.S. and has been known to advocate for the establishment of a white “ethnostate.”

His social media presence has been the target of previous crackdowns. In 2016, Twitter took down the National Policy Institute’s Twitter page as well as Spencer’s.

Spencer’s account was later reinstated, although he lost his verification badge in 2017.