Facebook bans woman for hate speech for asking ‘why are men so dumb?’

A woman from Detroit was handed a Facebook ban after her joke about men was deemed ‘hate speech.’

Facebook served Candace King with a 24-hour timeout after commenting, ‘why are men so dumb?’ in response to a meme that compared nail varnish colours.

The image showed two similar shades of purple nail varnish with the text, ‘Women will look you straight in the face and tell you these are two different colors’.

Candace responded to the meme with, ‘why are men so dumb?’Twitter

“I posted on there ‘this is a different color, why are men so stupid’ and then 5 seconds later, the comment just disappeared and I was like what’s going on,” Candace told FOX 2.

She then received a message from Facebook to inform her that the innocent comment ‘did not follow community standards for hate speech.’ She said, “At first I thought it was a joke (and) I’m like yeah right I’m blocked..what? But it was real, for sure.”

Candace reiterated that she is not a man-hater and her comment was intended as a joke – this led her to believe the ban was down to Facebook’s algorithm, “I feel like it’s a comment in jest and maybe if an actual person was reviewing this stuff, it might not. But I think most of it is just with Facebook algorithms.”

Fortunately for Candace, she was soon back on the social media site, but received a warning that if she did it again, ‘the punishment would be more severe.’

According to Facebook, hate speech is: “a direct attack against people on the basis of what we call protected characteristics: race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease. We define attacks as violent or dehumanising speech, harmful stereotypes, statements of inferiority, expressions of contempt, disgust or dismissal, cursing and calls for exclusion or segregation.”