Elliot Rodger Santa Barbara Shooting Update: Facebook Removes Fan Pages for Isla Vista Shooter
Several fan pages glorifying Elliot Rodger, the college student who took the lives of six people last Friday, have sprung up throughout Facebook.
The social networking site has been removing the controversial pages since Sunday morning but others keep coming up to replace the ones taken down, USA Today reported.
Facebook is a company that tries to establish a community of respect, but Danielle Citron, a University of Maryland School of Law professor, said Facebook is "often outpaced" when it comes to the speed of content being posted.
Both Facebook and YouTube have community guidelines that allow users to report abuse, which are monitored all day long by hundreds of reviewers worldwide, according to the Facebook's website.
Citron said Facebook and YouTube could ban hate speech because they are private companies but the words of their users are still protected under the law. She said only "a very small pocket" of speech is not protected, which includes threats against people or incitement of imminent violence.
On Sunday, Facebook removed the fan page "Elliot Rodger is an American hero," which praised the 22-year-old for his murderous acts, but by Tuesday a new version was created. The site removed the page hours later.
The site was made aware of the pages after numerous users emailed the company urging Facebook to remove the "American hero" fan page. Upon users reporting the site to Facebook, they were met with an online message stating the page was not in violation of the site's terms and use, according to the USA Today.
However, Facebook spokesman Matt Steinfeld said the users who reported should not have received those messages. Facebook removed the pages after discovering the site's error.
Rodger's family members have also taken down the controversial homemade videos that he had posted to his YouTube account but since then other users have reposted them, Forbes reported.
A YouTube spokesperson told Mashable that any content posted to the site that is of a "news context" would be allowed to stay up.