6 MIL REASONS
Zuck ‘evolves,’ bans Holocaust deniers on FB
Facebook will ban any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust, reversing its policy amid growing pressure from survivors and Jewish organizations.
Anyone searching for Holocaust posts on the social media website will also be directed to “authoritative sources to get accurate information,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post on Monday.
Zuckerberg previously defended keeping such content up even though he found them “deeply offensive.” But he admitted Monday that his “own thinking has evolved as I’ve seen data showing an increase in anti-Semitic violence.”
“I’ve struggled with the tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused by minimizing or denying the horror of the Holocaust,” he said. “Drawing the right lines between what is and isn’t acceptable speech isn’t straightforward, but with the current state of the world, I believe this is the right balance.”
Social media platforms are increasingly being pushed to take harsher action against misinformation and conspiracy theories ahead of Election Day.
Facebook recently took down pages and content connected to white supremacy and the QAnon conspiracy theory, but critics say those actions do little to prevent hate speech from spreading across the platform of nearly three billion users.
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany coordinated a recent campaign — dubbed #NoDenyingIt — that featured multiple videos from Holocaust survivors urging Facebook to remove posts denying the 20th century genocide.
“Survivors spoke! Facebook listened,” the New York-based group tweeted Monday, applauding the new ban.
An alarming survey released last month by the conference found that almost two-thirds of young American adults don’t know that 6million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.
Another 23% of survey respondents said they either believed the Holocaust was a myth or an exaggeration or weren’t sure.
The Anti-Defamation League also celebrated the long-awaited ban. “This has been years in the making,” CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted. “Having personally engaged with @ Facebook on the issue, I can attest the ban on Holocaust Denial is a big deal... Glad it finally happened.”
But Facebook warned that enforcement of the new policies “cannot happen overnight.”
“There is a range of content that can violate these policies, and it will take some time to train our reviewers and systems on enforcement,” Monika Bickert, the company’s vice president of content policy, said in a blog post.