Facebook is yet to take action against a fan page promoting overtly racist views against indigenous Australians, despite numerous complaints to the media giant.
As first reported by SBS yesterday afternoon, the page has been active since 4 June and uses memes to convey racially abusive attitudes about Australian Aborigines. SBS said the site was created and maintained by a teenage boy from Perth.
Many Facebook users have reported the page to the social media behemoth but received a response from Facebook which said it could not confirm the page violated the company's statement of rights and responsibilities.
However, within Facebook's policies is a ban on posting content that violates the law. Under the federal Racial Discrimination Act of 1975, it is unlawful for a person to do an act in public (which includes public communication) which may reasonably offend a group of people based on race, colour or national or ethnic origin.
Additionally, Facebook has a community standards policy which prohibits hate speech and does not allow attacks based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or medical condition.
A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment at the time of writing.
At the time of SBS' article yesterday, the page had almost 3000 'likes'. That figure has now grown to over 4000 as of 11am this morning. The title of the page was originally 'Aboriginal memes', however has been amended to add 'Controversial humour' to the heading.
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