Facebook to ban white nationalism and separatism content

After months of deliberation, Facebook has finally decided to abandon a longstanding policy of allowing white supremacy from its platform.

The policy change, which will go into effect next week, comes just days after the social network was criticised when the gunman livestreamed the Christchurch massacre.

The platform also pledged to improve its ability to identify and block terror-related material.

In a post, facebook explained that it had previously allowed white nationalist content as it didn't view it as racist.

"We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism – things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity," the post read.