Was what I said on Facebook really ‘hate speech’?

Facebook has been accused of failing to combat extremism and hate-speech among its users. But as I found out this week, sometimes it does far too much to take down controversial opinions.

Coffee House recently published an article by me with the headline ‘Michael Parkinson is right: men are funnier than women’. In the piece, I argued that men are more adapted to and adept at humour because they are less grounded in reality and more at home with incongruence. I said that because humour is often based on cruelty and schadenfreude it is also suited to the typically more aggressive male mindset.

In short, I said that men and women were different. I did not say than men were better than woman. If anything, I actually implied the opposite.

But try telling that to Facebook, which has removed my article for ‘violating our standards on hate speech’. What does and doesn’t fall foul of the Facebook moderators – and why – can be hard to work out.