Zuckerberg lets Holocaust deniers shame Facebook
THE spread of the racist altright is slowly turning America into the disunited States. There isn’t a week that goes by without some incident where white privilege turns into a mockable meme.
We’ve had the case of “Permit Patty”, a white woman who called police on an eight-year-old Africanamerican girl for selling lemonade without council permission.
Then there was “Coupon Carl”, a chemist manager who called the cops after a black woman tried to use a coupon he believed to be fraudulent. He was wrong.
Incidents like this are increasingly becoming the norm in the States. Central to the breakdown in relations between the races is the alt-right.
Their poison has infected every walk of life but what is most troubling is their rehabilitation of Nazism.
And in doing so they now exploit every platform they can that gives them an opening.
It was, therefore, disturbing to hear Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg say posts on his site from Holocaust deniers should be allowed.
The billionaire said that instead of banning such items the company would make sure they were not presented prominently in the News Feed, the posts seen most frequently by individual users.
“I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened,” he said.
“I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.”
As the CEO of the largest social media platform in the world, it was abhorrent to hear.
The Holocaust is the greatest crime in history, one that people remain desperate to understand. Germany’s plunge from the heights of civilisation to the depths of barbarism is an everlasting shock.
But Zuckerberg’s questionable claim that some deny the Holocaust out of ignorance rather than malice does not absolve Facebook of responsibility for hosting and spreading such hate.
Imagine someone saying on Facebook that black slavery is acceptable or homosexuality is a mental illness before touting various “cures”? Would Zuckerberg sit idly by and let people say that too?
No one denies the Holocaust through ignorance. It’s a deliberate, protracted propaganda campaign to create support from under any stone they can overturn.
They don’t have to sell the whole lie up front. They plant the smallest seed of doubt knowing they’ll reap what they sow later. The drip, drip, drip of denial is core to their strategy of rehabilitating and legitimising Nazism as an ideology, towards their goal of winning people over to their agenda of anti-semitism, racism and hatred.
As a person who created and provides a platform for the dissemination of information on a scale never seen before, Zuckerberg needs to wake up to his responsibilities.
He must recognise that holocaust deniers are antisemites, fascists and white supremacists. Their agenda, as it was in 1933 when the Holocaust began, is to reinforce and spread the very hatred that produced it.
Facebook fascism has no place in the world.
People remain desperate to understand greatest crime in history