Exeter Uni reports Exehonestly for allowing ‘Nazi propaganda’

The University of Exeter has reported student confession page Exehonestly to Facebook after accusations that admins have allowed Nazi propaganda to be posted on the page.

A series of posts on Exehonestly were found to have Neo-Nazi and white supremacist origins. Screenshots of the posts have been circulating on Twitter after students realised the confessions had racist connotations.

Exeter's Jewish Society told The Exeter Tab: "We are appalled by the recent posts on ExeHonestly. Whilst we champion free speech and see a great value in it, there is no space for Jewish students, or indeed any students at any university to feel uncomfortable or scared due to their religious, racial or ethnic background.

"We praise the university for taking action, bringing a problem to the attention of students."

The University responded to the tweets, stating that they "will report the page to Facebook immediately".

One post offered a bag of sweets to those who could answer the riddle: "What accounts for 13%, yet 52%?".

A reference to a statistic circulated by white supremacist online communities, who claim that "despite making up only 13% of the population, blacks make up 52% of crimes."

Another post reads: "People's favourite number? Mine's 1488".

Both posts have since been deleted.

This is a combination of two white supremacist symbols.

The first being 14, which is shorthand for the fourteen-word slogan "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children", coined by David Lane, a member of white supremacist terrorist group 'The Order'.

The second is 88, which stands for "Heil Hitler"; H being the eighth letter of the alphabet.

The page has a history of posting controversial confessions. Last November it was forced to apologise after uploading a racist post reading "No nut november is a pisstake. Everyone knows no n-word november is the real challenge".

ExeHonestly told The Tab Exeter: "We do not condone any hateful racist content on our page, and endeavour to filter any posts of that nature.

"As soon as we were made aware of the true meaning behind those posts, we removed them from our page.

"We deeply regret that they cleared our attempts at scrutiny and have made people feel unsafe, however, we do hope that people understand the nature of dog whistle posts is that the true meaning is not apparent to people unless they are aware of the hidden meaning behind them – if we were aware of the meaning we would not have approved the post."

"We are disappointed that certain individuals chose to screenshot those posts and post them on their personal twitter accounts, rather than immediately alert us to the post's true meaning, as this would have resulted in the posts being removed sooner and has given more publicity to someone's posts who was likely intentionally trying to be inflammatory and cause a reaction."

The admins of the confession page have criticised the University's decision to escalate matters to the Police Hate Crime Unit.

They told The Tab Exeter: "We are not sure as to who they mean by being 'responsible'.

"The University has made no attempt to contact us about those posts in order to identify those responsible for submitting them, and in the past when we have reached out to them to improve our support and conduct, they have been combative and uncooperative."

They added: "As a team, we do not believe ourselves to be responsible of any crime, as hate crime requires genuine intent to stir hatred, and we were regretfully ignorant of the posts meaning and took action as soon as we became aware of it."