People can have legitimate stand against the use of military by nation states. However, such a stand should not lead to the promotion of hate of and discrimination against our military personnel and veterans. Unfortunately, the Facebook community page Gaia’s Dancing Indigo Children (Facebook ID: 828716663905465) is failing to make that distinction. The page belongs to an American new-age spiritual group. The group takes an extreme position on a number of issues but the posts discussed in this briefing cross the line into negatively stereotyping a whole group of people and promoting discrimination against them.
The extreme positions taken by the page have led some to question whether it is a satire page. We don’t believe it is a satire page because the page admins continue to maintain the stand in their comment sections. Even as the discussions get heated, the admins only fan the fire by maintaining and repeating their hateful stand. Provoking people, by itself, is not hate. However, when your provocation is leading to hate against a group of people, and instead of scaling it back or clarifying your intention, you encourage it, the resultant effect is promotion of hate regardless of your intentions.
In this briefing, we focus on three specific posts by the page that clearly promote hate against military veterans, and men in general. We focus on these groups because of the gross generalisations used in the posts. The posts have been shared many times, and are being taken seriously by many.
Please report the posts to Facebook and to OHPI’s online hate monitoring tool FightAgainstHate.com for us to be able to monitor the number of times it has been reported and the response of the platform to the reports.
Example 1: Presenting all military veterans as violent and unstable
View the post to report.
The above post negatively stereotypes against military veterans as “violent, unstable alcoholics” and on the basis of this gross generalisation recommends that they shouldn’t be allowed unsupervised time with their children. While it is true that military veterans do take time to adjust back into society, they need our support and encouragement to do that. This post merely promotes unreasonable fear of them.
Example 2: Presenting all military veterans as violent
View post to report it.
The post encourages fear and demonisation of military veterans. While the discussion about gun ownership in the US is legitimate, the post uses hateful language by comparing military veterans to violent animals, presents them as inherently violent and uncontrolled, and targets them specifically for denial of gun ownership.
Example 3: Promoting hate against men
View post to report.
The above post is a clear case of misandry. It uses baseless statistics to present all men as potential pedophiles. It is a gross exaggeration and amounts to their demonisation.
Please report the above posts.
Here are instructions on how to report posts on Facebook. We also have instructions on how to report them to FightAgainstHate.com (FAH). Please choose the category Hate Against Military Veterans for the first two examples (when reporting to our system), and Other, for the last. (You can directly log into our system using your Facebook logins. If not, you will have to register using an email account).
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