Should Facebook allow inflammatory groups?

Yesterday, I picked up a story regarding young Muslims' appropriate offense to hate groups targeting Islam on Facebook. In response, many of these people are starting counter-groups, some are quitting Facebook all together, and others are petitioning the site to ax these groups by threatening to quit.

From the article: "[Aya] Fouad [a young Muslim girl from Cairo, Egypt], decided to create her own group — a petition threatening to quit Facebook if the anti-Islam group is not removed. In three days, the group’s membership was more than 2,000. 'People multiplied dramatically overnight,' Fouad said. 'I thought, "There’s a point in what I’m saying."'

At last count, her group had more than 76,000 members."

On the other hand, some are using Facebook to further education about Islam instead of firing back. In fact, Soheal Malik, a law student from England, took over one of the abandoned hate groups and is running it as a forum to discuss Islam.

"'People are going to join thinking it’s the same group. Maybe they’ll be exposed to some information,' Malik said. 'It would be good a thing to get people talking instead of fighting.'"

Either way, this situation is a slippery slope for Facebook, which declined comment regarding the topic. Though hate speech is explicitly banned in the site's terms of use (which are pretty damn lengthy), banning free speech is going to be a tough nut to crack.

A chief concern is that "angry and emotional exchanges could inflame users, tempting them to take their frustrations into the outside world," but I don't see how this kind of speech is any different than living in the everyday world. Should Facebook be responsible to protect people from each other?

The easy answer is no, because it's simply there to provide a site for social networking. However, if an incident does occur because of something that started on Facebook, the site could be held publicly responsible (even though not legally).

In the end, I don't really see these groups as a bad thing. Of course blind hatred of anyone is terrible, but it's also a reality. By seeing something in this forum, maybe, like Malik has done above, the hate speech can be used against itself to grow greater awareness of the idiocy these bigots project. Instead of firing back maliciously, turn the situation into a positive and educate people on the subject.

This is the advantage of free speech; it, initially, doesn't do any harm. Before violence occurs, it is always possible to engage in discourse. Unfortunately not enough people understand this concept. Diminishing speech rights leads to less compromise, more fear, and ultimately more hatred because people don't allow themselves to understand each other. By not being able to speak about how they feel, their conflict is never resolved.

We need to stop pretending hate and racism don't exist and actually start working on addressing them. Facebook is a nice little microcosm of the modern generation; why not start there?