The Confederacy Is Alive & Well on Facebook
“Happy John Wilkes Booth Day,” one commenter writes, commemorating the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. “Our Avenger,” reads a response directly below it. “Landed gentry was a vital part of our Southern heritage, and it is in dire need of being reinstated,” reads a different post a short scroll down.
You might think that these quotes come from alternative social media sites such as Telegram, Parlor, or Gab, but they are from Facebook — a company that has policies discouraging these types of behavior. These, in particular, come from the group Secessionist Party (CSA). All over this platform, people are advocating for the resurrection of an empire built upon the enslavement of human beings.
The existence of these groups represents a dicey ideological question for the social network. We should want to preserve records of even the darkest moments in our history, but what happens when that aim is used as a pretext to share and recruit others into a hateful ideology? Where should the line be drawn between discussion and hate speech?
While the Confederacy may have surrendered over 150 years ago, for these Facebook groups, its spirit is still around and waiting to rise again.
The first thing you have to keep in mind is that this is not one or two groups. I cataloged over 20 active groups and pages in my research and over a hundred inactive ones, and my list is by no means exhaustive. These groups ranged from those with only a couple hundred members or likes to ones in the hundreds of thousands. Some of them are open to the public, but the vast majority are private, especially since Facebook has more aggressively regulated them in recent years. They hence require moderator approval to join.
Most of these groups advertise themselves as dedicated to the appreciation of Southern heritage or history. Many posts are simply uploads of old pictures and memorials. You will see a painting of Confederate soldiers on horseback or black and white photos of children waving the Confederate flag.
Source: Dixie Cotton Confederates
As the About section for the group, Dixie Cotton Confederates describes: “This is a Confederate history site. We love our heritage. This group is neither radically nor politically motivated…” Yet this pretext melts away immediately in the next line, with that alleged neutrality not even staying within the group description. “…however,” the author continues, “we do hold concervative [sic] values.”
These groups overwhelmingly have a right-leaning bent, with many of them replicating more traditional conservative rhetoric. It’s common to see posts lambasting socialism, disparaging Democrats, and of course, praising former 45th President Donald Trump. “I Miss Donald Trump,” states one user on Dixie Cotton Confederates. “UR STILL MY PRESIDENT,” reads another. Discriminatory posts are frequent among these users, with commenters clinging onto social battles that feel decades or centuries old. “I posit,” shares one commenter in Secessionist Party (CSA), “that there is an ocean of anecdotal evidence suggesting the development of same-sex attraction is a direct result of child abuse.” He then links to his blog that covers the same topic in greater detail — none of the information particularly accurate.
Racial issues are not much better, with even “tame” posts quickly escalating into pretty hurtful directions. One comment in the group Confederate Supporters posted a meme about not being offended by the confederate flag but instead being incensed by saggy jeans, clothing with a long history of being associated with Black people. A commenter below it immediately picked up on this subtext, writing: “N@ggas to [sic] lazy to pull pants up, lazy stupid bastards.” Clearly, a hateful comment, yet the moderators have yet to intervene, and no one has self-reported it.
Source: Confederate Supporters
Additionally, there is the prevalence of conspiracy theories that have overtaken the Republican Party in recent years. Anti-vaccine and anti-masking sentiments are still quite common, with posters sharing memes and videos of intense skepticism over these two medical practices. The same goes for the belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. “The worst attack on American soil happened in the Ballot boxes on November 3rd, 2020,” one user reposted on Dixie Cotton Confederates in late May of 2021. This is a comment that slipped past Facebook’s aggressive flagging system with voter fraud.
Since many of these comments technically go against Facebook’s terms of service, moderators are in a constant battle to curb the more heinous offenses. “Bullying of any kind isn’t allowed, and degrading comments about things like race, religion, culture, sexual orientation, gender, or identity will not be tolerated,” reads one of the rules for the group Confederate live’s matter trump 2024. These rules are common on Confederate pages and groups, indicating the prevalence of that type of content on their sites.
Yet, the culture of bigotry and hatred is there. I have found an abundance of hate speech in many of these groups (see above comment on baggy pants). Even when commenters are not dropping the N-word, the subtext is still there. The biggest element that ties these groups together is a softness for the Confederacy — again, an organization built on slavery — which means that an insidious racial dynamic exists in the entire feed ecosystem.
The page Southern Historical Society, for example, primarily posts old photos and paintings. It bills itself as devoted to “Southern history from the Mid 1800's,” but several times a day, you will see content that sympathetically paints the old Confederacy in a more positive light. “No People, in the history of the world, have ever been so misunderstood, so misjudged, and so cruelly maligned,” the page posted of Southerners. This quote comes from a former Confederate general named John B. Gordon, who, at the time, was lamenting the alleged horrors of Reconstruction. “It’s not just about history,” goes another meme, “The South was right.”
Source: Confederate live’s matter trump 2024
But right how?
The only way that you can hold this position is if you completely divorce the Confederacy from the institution of slavery, which of course, is what a lot of pro-Confederates end up doing. This stance ties into the myth of the “Lost Cause,” or the idea that the Confederacy was a heroic institution not centered on the principle of slavery but rather unfairly attacked by Northern aggressors. This false narrative allowed Southerners to immediately resist the new political order built after the Civil War (see Reconstruction) and continues to be employed to this day. Many posts will still use the terminology of “Rebels” or “Rebellion” to describe confederates — something tying directly into this legacy.
Occasionally that belief that the Confederacy (often conflated with the South itself) did nothing wrong is far more direct than a sassy meme. There exists on the platform not only advertising for pro-Confederate organizations such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans, but groups promoting a new secession from the Union. The group Secessionist Party (CSA), for example, advocates for an “immediate secession from the United States” with a desire to build an ethno-nationist state for the Confederate people. This desire to resurrect the Confederacy is a common rhetorical point in this space. “The South Will Rise Again,” reads one comment ominously in the group Confederate Supporters.
These groups clearly are doing more than a mere recording and appreciation of history. Contrary to their claims of neutrality, they use the pretext of history to promote a specific ideology. They are not passive figures in history. They are instead constructing a version of the past to build towards a more hateful future.
The issue of Confederate groups on Facebook has been consistently reported on for over half a decade. Vice ran a piece back in 2015 about a reporter infiltrating a group called confederate pride, heritage not hate. Slate published a piece last year about the prevalence of the groups on the platform, writing: “Facebook can be dangerous not just for its content, but for its lack of public data; for how its (private) algorithms work; for the ways it amplifies certain voices and can lead to deeper polarization and, in some cases, radicalization.”
Recently Facebook has removed hundreds of groups directly associated with hate movements, including ones connected to the Proud Boys, American Guard, and the “boogaloo” movement. The company now has clear-cut rules on hate speech, defining it as: “violent or dehumanizing speech, harmful stereotypes, statements of inferiority, expressions of contempt, disgust or dismissal, cursing and calls for exclusion or segregation.” It's not apparent, however, that the core problem has been addressed because, again, the bigotry is still there. This crackdown has merely pushed many Confederate groups to switch from public group settings to private ones.
There continue to be gaps in moderation. Some of these groups consistently violate Community Standards in self-evident ways. It’s hard to see how the Secessionist Party (CSA) — a group literally calling for segregation in the way of an ethnostate — does not constitute “calls for exclusion or segregation.”
Source: Secessionist Party (CSA)
I was also able to find slurs and calls for an uprising or civil war on many of these groups — though my study of the previous reporting leads me to believe that this has gone down in the last year. Dixie Cotton Confederates, for example, used to have over 100,000 members, and now that number sits at 19,000. Despite this drop, however, the group still shares memes calling for a return to the Confederacy.
Part of this continued gap in moderation has to do with how the company regulates content. Facebook relies on a combination of AI and self-reporting to make sure that people are adhering to Community Standards. Now that many of these groups have switched from public to private settings, AI is largely how hate speech must be regulated. This is because there are fewer outsiders to take these groups to task. To avoid the algorithm, moderators are interested in making sure things don’t get “too political.” However, they are still there to promote a White Supremacist worldview, which means that hate speech that is subtextual, indirect, or just stated in a nonvulgar way will often not get taken down.
Many pro-Confederate groups will often have rules that prohibit degrading comments and bullying of someone’s identity, but they then actively support an ideology centered on the subjugation of other people's identities. These groups use Facebook’s legalese to avoid criticism, dancing around the issue until they can be more direct again. They may claim to be against hate speech (and some may truly believe that), but after spending some time sifting through these feeds, it's apparent that the hate speech is there.
Confederate or Southern pride groups also serve as jumping-off points for other, less-regulated spaces. Spend enough time on these groups, and you will easily be directed to more “vocal” content both on the platform and outside of it. For example, on Dixie Cotton Confederates, I saw several reposts for non-Confederate Facebook groups such as Man Cave, which is far more derogatory in how it depicts marginalized communities such as queer people. “This is what a dying society looks like,” one post fearmongers, insinuating that a child seeing kinksters at a Pride event somehow indicates the end of our society.
Additionally, I saw many redirects to websites such as Rumble, which has been described as “the worst possible things about YouTube amplified.” Members of the alt-right like Donald Trump Jr., Patriot Streetfighter, and Mark Levin constantly use that platform to push far-right content. “Get ready for war,” one video thumbnail reads, describing protests in the wake of U.S. Marshals killing Winston Boogie Smith Jr. in Minneapolis. Rumble can take you down a rabbit hole of reactionary content with just a few clicks — a statement that applies to many of these original Facebook feeds as well.
Source: Rumble
Confederate Facebook groups can be breeding grounds for White Supremacist thought. They are insidious in how they package their worldviews. To reach a fair amount of people (and to stay online at all), they are willing to couch what they say in the language of history and inclusivity, and yet calling for the return of a slave-holding empire sure doesn't feel inclusive. Even if propaganda like the Lost Cause doesn’t make people consciously realize how damaging their rhetoric is, it doesn’t change the fact that it is hurtful. If a person or entity calls for an awful thing nicely, that doesn’t make it good.
This opens up a fundamental question about content moderation. This issue is not just about Facebook regulating its Community Guidelines more stringently but making a political decision on how it will treat the depiction of the Confederacy on its platform. This problem is not about the presentation of history but about what kinds of political behavior Facebook considers acceptable.
Pro-Confederate spaces on Facebook have gone through a lot of shifts in recent years. These groups used to be far more vocal than they are currently and had a far more pervasive reach. In combination with the public’s increasingly negative reaction following Charlottesville and the January 6th Insurrection, recent reforms have dampened their influence on the platform.
However, the bigotry is still there, and some of these groups are putting forth very alarming rhetoric. It should concern us that a group can actively call for secession under the banner of one of the most hateful countries in modern history. It’s all well and good to chronicle dark periods of history (I spend a lot of time doing that on this blog), but there is a difference between trying to understand that darkness and whitewashing it so you can repeat the mistakes of the past.
At a certain point, a political decision needs to be made by Facebook (or far more likely, our government) of whether it will accept the promotion of the Confederacy’s iconography or not. Do we treat the symbols of the Confederacy — not just the rhetoric behind it — as hate speech? And if so, what does that actually look like?
I have no easy answers. We exist at an awkward crossroad right now, where, as long as pro-Confederates talk nicely about the issue of resurrecting a slave empire, it's not viewed as a problem. However, the confederacy as an ideal should be perceived as a problem because, again, it is an institution founded on the principle of enslaving other human beings. There is no way to make that concept inoffensive.
I currently live in the South — a short drive away from the former Confederate capital— and I do not believe that these symbols or ideals should represent my community. Heritage is more than the bones of hateful men long since buried. It’s a chance to realize that they were wrong and the promise to commit to something better.