Vandals Deface Facebook's Hamburg Offices (google.com)

Reuters reports that 15 to 20 vandals dressed in black this weekend defaced Facebook's Hamburg offices, spray-painting "Facebook dislike" on a wall, and causing some minor property damage. From the story: "A Facebook spokesman said nobody was injured in the incident. He said he could not immediately comment on the possible motive for the act of vandalism. The European head of Facebook is under investigation in Germany over the social network's alleged failure to remove racist hate speech. The investigation was announced last month as German politicians and celebrities voiced concern about the rise of anti-foreigner comments in German on Facebook and other social media as the country struggles to cope with a refugee influx. (The Guardian has a nearly identical story, but a better photo.)

Comments

Facebook should not remove hate speech.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

There is hate. And there is hate speech. Banning it only drives it underground. Better to allow such haters to speak freely and openly so that we get an idea of how many such people there are. And we can develop ways to talk to them and try to convince the errors in their way. But we will not be able remove all hate and all haters. Some low level of hate has to be tolerated.

Having said that, I wish Facebook would stand for free speech in all spheres. Not just racist speech. If some misguided group decides to offend some religion by depicting their deities in bad light, or even merely depicting their deity itself is considered offensive, Facebook should defend that too, to be consistent.