Facebook says Auschwitz victim images violate codes

Meta apologises for blunder in which posts were reported for showing ‘nudity’ and ‘bullying’

FACEBOOK has apologised for wrongly labelling photographs of Auschwitz victims as showing “bullying” and “nudity”.

The social media giant incorrectly labelled 20 of the Auschwitz Memorial Museum’s posts with a note saying they had been moved down their feed for violating community standards.

The posts, showing people who died in the concentration camp in Poland, were flagged as showing “bullying and harassment” and “adult nudity and sexual activity”. An image showing a group of orphans was also deleted.

The museum said the censorship was “unacceptable and offensive to the memory of the victims of Auschwitz”.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has since claimed that the photographs were not moved down the museum’s page. It said the notices received by the museum, which said the posts had violated standards, were sent by mistake. It did admit, however, that the image of orphans had been deleted by mistake and had now been restored.

“We offer our sincere apologies for the error,” a Meta spokesman said.

The museum is on the site of the concentration camp in Oświecim, where more than one million people died, including 960,000 Jews, during the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Museum staff said they had been posting photographs of Auschwitz victims “for years” before Facebook said they were violating standards.

One post of Ida Mullerová, a Czech Jewish woman who died at Auschwitz, was said to go against “community standards for sexual solicitation”. Another, showing victim Marie Sachnowitz, a Norwegian Jewish woman murdered in a gas chamber, was said to show “adult nudity and sexual activity”.

And an image of Berek Anataba, a Polish Jewish man who died, allegedly showed “bullying and harassment”.

The museum said: “For years, the Auschwitz Memorial has been sharing similar content without any issues, yet suddenly, 21 posts are simultaneously flagged. We also noticed that a post commemorating the tragic fate of Jewish children from an orphanage in Izieu from April 6 was summarily removed without the possibility of recourse.

“Such an act is unacceptable and offensive to the memory of the victims of Auschwitz that we try to preserve. The posts in question feature nothing but respectful remembrance and historical documentation, showcasing the faces and information of those who suffered and were murdered in a place that symbolises one of the darkest chapters of human history.”

A Meta spokesman said: “We mistakenly sent notices that several pieces of content the museum posted had been demoted. That content does not violate our policies and was never actually demoted. We offer our sincere apologies for the error.”