You can’t post hate speech to Facebook. But if you blame Trump for it, does that make it okay? One artist thinks so.
Kate Kretz complains that through her art conflating “make America great again” hats with swastikas and Ku Klux Klan hoods, she’s just calling out Trump’s injustice. Facebook has taken down her images anyway.
Kretz complained that in early May, Facebook removed images of her MAGA-KKK hood (titled, “Hate Hat”) and MAGA swastika (titled, “Only the Terrorized Own the Right to Name Symbols of Terror”) for violating its “community standards.”
After she reposted the images, adding text that claimed the artworks were addressing hate speech and not hate speech themselves, Facebook disabled her account.
Kretz chronicled the saga on Medium, saying, “We live in dangerous times, and need artist voices more than ever.”
It’s OK to post offensive images such as KKK hats or swastikas, she argues, so long as she conflates them with the MAGA hats worn by nearly a million people. White supremacists and Nazis may perpetuate hate speech, but, she argues, so does Trump. In her Medium post, Kretz wrote:
Despite her fearmongering and conspiracy theory promulgation (“What would happen if the Koch brothers bought Facebook?” she writes. “What if they already have?”), Kretz should not have been banned from Facebook.
Comparing Trump to the KKK and Nazis is a ridiculous and clichéd move, but Facebook should allow her to post her art. She’s not creating hate speech, even if a case can be made that her unhealthy juxtaposition approaches it.
If Facebook restores Kretz’s account — there’s a petition with 1,200 signatures for it to do so — then hopefully her bad art can spark a discussion about why it’s so terrible.
With its suppression of these works, Facebook just bolsters Kretz’s sense of self-righteousness and victimization. Her poor excuse for art is not worth censoring.
