Zuckerberg says Facebook won’t ban Holocaust deniers as ‘people can express opinions’
FACEBOOK will not ban accounts or pages that espouse Holocaust denial or other harmful conspiracy theories, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, has said.
In an interview with Recode, a tech website, he said the principle of “giving people a voice, so that people can express their opinions” had to be balanced against harmful lies or conspiracy theories. “Let’s take this closer to home. I’m Jewish, and there is a set of people that deny the Holocaust happened. 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,” he said.
Facebook specifically “geo blocks” Holocaust denial only in four countries where it risks prosecution, such as in Germany. In recent weeks, calls have emerged for Facebook to take down pages that promote conspiracy theories. Pages such as Infowars have in the past promoted theories, such as that the Sandy Hook school massacre in the US was a hoax, and yet have remained on Facebook.
Mr Zuckerberg said: “The approach that we’ve taken to false news is not to say, ‘You can’t say something wrong on the internet’. I think that would be too extreme. Everyone gets things wrong.”
He added that Facebook will not try to remove pages providing they are not trying to cause or encourage physical harm. Facebook still removes posts that it says causes real harm, or instances that are reported as bullying.
Facebook has been fighting a battle against fake news spreading in its news feed but Mr Zuckerberg said the site would not take down these stories.
“If people flag them as potential hoaxes, we send those to fact-checkers … If those fact-checkers say that it is provably false, then we will significantly reduce the distribution of that content,” he said.
He added that the company had a “responsibility to recognise that the tools won’t always be used for good things” in cases of terrorism, self-harm, suicide, bullying or election interference.
A separate investigation this week revealed shortcomings in Facebook’s moderation policy on taking down offensive content. Undercover reporters discovered that a Dublin-based company contracted by Facebook was failing to remove content of under age users, even if they were self-harming.
Facebook has said it would be retraining its moderators and updating its policies.