Facebook bans Holocaust denial and distortion, in hate speech policy update
Social media giant says it will redirect people to authoritative sources if they search for denial info
Facebook announced Monday that it had updated its hate speech policy and will now ban any posts that deny or attempt to distort the scale of the Holocaust - the mechanized annihilation of six million Jews.
In addition, the Internet leviathan revealed that anyone searching for such information would be redirected to "authoritative sources," according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
"We've long taken down posts that praise hate crimes or mass murder, including the Holocaust. But with rising anti-Semitism, we're expanding our policy to prohibit any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust as well," the company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook blog post.
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10112455086578451
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Zuckerberg has been outspoken about the need to attempt to balance legitimate freedom of speech and to censor anything that could be construed as hateful.
During the summer, Holocaust survivors - whose numbers are rapidly dwindling - pressured Zuckerberg and Facebook to remove Holocaust denial posts from the social media site.
In a 2018 podcast interview, Zuckerberg said that Holocaust deniers are "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," he continued. "I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong."