No place for denialists

Facebook has stooped to defending the indefensible in dealing with Holocaust and school-shooting liars

What was the most damning tech news last week? That Google’s Android was fined $5bn for anticompetitive behaviour? That Donald Trump continued to obfuscate around Russian meddling in US elections? Or that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended the rights of Holocaust denialists?

The latter stands out for me — perhaps because I’m Jewish and some of my family died in the Holocaust. It’s as breathlessly insulting as that moron from Afriforum claiming apartheid wasn’t a crime against humanity.

Zuckerberg’s breathtakingly inept answer about Holocaust denialism is a terrible revelation about how Facebook deals with fake news and other patently untrue drivel.

He made his comments in a podcast with Kara Swisher, who runs tech news site Recode, a week after a mind-numbingly stupid comment by John Hegeman, the head of Facebook’s news feed.

Asked by CNN’S Oliver Darcy why Facebook tolerates fake news site Infowars — which denies the Holocaust as well the horrific Sandy Hook school massacre — Hegeman said it does not “take down false news … I guess just for being false, that doesn’t violate the community standards”.

Facebook’s policy chief Monika Bickert made similarly asinine comments to the US Congress.

Zuckerberg told Swisher: “I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened. I find that deeply offensive. But 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.”

There is no denying that the Holocaust didn’t happen. Six million Jews and many millions of other minorities were murdered. You don’t “unintentionally” get something of this scale and horror wrong.

“It feels like Facebook is waiting for someone to die before something gets done,” Nelba Márquez-greene, whose child was killed at Sandy Hook, told NBC.

Last week Barack Obama spoke in his speech for the Nelson Mandela annual lecture about the politics of fake news espoused by his successor, especially around climate change.

“We have to actually believe in an objective reality … You have to believe in facts,” Obama said. After years of the corruption denialism of Jacob Zuma’s shadow Gupta state, we should be acutely aware of this. “Unfortunately, too much of politics today seems to reject the very concept of objective truth. People just make stuff up,” Obama said.

In the case of Infowars, Facebook’s attitude is so indefensible it makes any rational conversation about its attempts to deal with fake news seem absurd. Worse, as research tracking how Infowars readers have turned to violence shows, it could have tragic consequences.

After years of denialism of Jacob Zuma’s shadow Gupta state, we should be acutely aware of this