‘As a person who created a platform for the dissemination of information on a scale never seen before, Zuckerberg needs to wake up to his responsibilities’
Naive Facebook founder failing to spot the dangers as anti-Semites use his site to muddy the waters of history around Nazis’ genocide
THE spread of the racist alt-right is slowly turning America into the disunited States. There isn’t a week that goes by without some incident going viral where white privilege turns into some mockable meme.
We’ve had the case of ‘Permit Patty’, a white woman who called the police on an eight-year-old African American girl for selling lemonade without council permission.
Then there was “Coupon Carl’, a chemist manager who called in 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 as the divide seems to grow on a daily basis. 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 they will seize upon any opportunity to do just that.
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. For real?
“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.
His position is so bizarre, it’s hard to know where to begin.
The Holocaust is the greatest crime in history, one that people remain desperate to understand. How Germany plunged from the heights of civilisation to the
The drip, drip, drip of denial is core to their strategy of rehabilitating ...Nazism as an ideology...
depths of barbarism is an everlasting shame.
But Zuckerberg’s questionable claim that some deny the Holocaust out of ignorance rather than malice should not, and does not, absolve Facebook of responsibility for uncritically hosting such hate.
Imagine someone saying on Facebook that black slavery or homosexuality is a mental illness before touting various “cures”.
Would Zuckerberg sit idly by and let people say that too?
No one wakes up one morning and starts denying genocide.
Holocaust deniers understand they’re engaged in a long, protracted propaganda campaign hoping 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.
In spreading hate and brainwashing the susceptible, they exploit any platform that will give them a voice.
Deniers, as they rise under Donald Trump’s presidency, feel more emboldened today than ever before. They are not the equivalent of some harmless flat-Earth theorists.
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 not unintentionally “getting it wrong” against all the evidence that shows up to 17 million people were killed for their religion.
These people are anti-Semites, 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 the Holocaust.
Facebook fascism has no place in the world.