Facebook has banned Holocaust denial, reversing a years-long policy that had come to symbolise the social media giant’s reluctance to be an "arbiter of truth".
The social media giant’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg caused alarm among civil rights advocates in 2018 when he insisted that the company would not censor Holocaust deniers simply because they "get things wrong".
But on Monday, Facebook’s content policy chief Monika Bickert said it would now forbid any content that "denies or distorts" the atrocity, citing a worldwide increase in hate speech and anti-Semitic beliefs.
It comes near the end of a transformative year for Facebook in which the coronavirus pandemic and the rapid rise of extremist movements have pushed it into levels of censorship that would have been inconceivable five years ago.
Last week the company banned all groups, pages and Instagram accounts from spreading the ideology of QAnon, a cult-like online movement which calls for the mass arrest or execution of numerous politicians and celebrities whom disciples believe to be part of a secret Satanic cabal.
In a post on his personal Facebook page on Monday, Mr Zuckerberg, who is himself Jewish, said his "thinking has evolved" due to data showing a rise in anti-Semitic violence, as well as Facebook’s slow but steady movement towards stricter rules on hate speech.
He said: "I’ve struggled with the tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused by minimising or denying the horror of the Holocaust.
"My own thinking has evolved as I’ve seen data showing an increase in anti-Semitic violence, as have our wider policies on hate speech.
"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."
Ms Bickert added that it will take time to enforce the new rule because Facebook’s roughly 15,000 moderators must be trained to recognise Holocaust denial in its legion of forms.
The policy is an expansion of Facebook’s decision earlier this year to ban anti-Semitic stereotypes that depict Jewish people as controlling the world or major institutions. The company will also bump "credible information" about the Holocaust to the top of related search results.
The Holocaust, known to many Jewish people as the Shoah, was the mass murder by Nazi Germany and its allies of more than six million Jews between 1933 and 1945. Some definitions also include the hundreds of thousands of disabled people, Romani, gay people and political dissidents killed by the Nazi regime.
The evidence for the Holocaust is beyond reasonable doubt, with many of its survivors still being alive today, but neo-Nazis and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists have sought to smear it as a hoax or downplay its severity. Polling suggests that 5pc of British adults do not believe it happened, with 45pc not knowing how many people died.
Longstanding critics of Facebook welcomed the news, including Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie and head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Jonathan Greenblatt.
Mr Greenblatt, who led the condemnation of Mr Zuckerberg’s previous stance and is one of the leaders of this summer’s Facebook advertising boycott, said the shift had been "years in the making".
He said: "Having personally engaged with Facebook on the issue, I can attest the ban on Holocaust Denial is a big deal. Whether it’s ADL and Stop Hate For Profit’s insistence… it doesn’t matter. Glad it finally happened."
This has been years in the making. Having personally engaged with @Facebook on the issue, I can attest the ban on Holocaust Denial is a big deal. Whether it's @ADL & #StopHateForProfit's insistence, #NoDenyingIt-it doesn't matter. Glad it finally happened. https://t.co/Yc2idnv33u
— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) October 12, 2020
This is obviously a good step for #StopHateForProfit and @FBoversight, but let’s not thank this company for doing what literally any other company on Earth would have done years ago.
— Sleeping Giants (@slpng_giants) October 12, 2020
That was a sharp contrast to 2018, when Mr Zuckerberg volunteered Holocaust denial as an "abhorrent" belief that Facebook would nevertheless allow for fear of deciding matters of truth.
"I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened," he told the US tech website Recode in a podcast interview.
"I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong… it’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent."
Mr Greenblatt, along with other critics, disagreed, arguing that Holocaust denial was a "willful, deliberate and longstanding deception tactic by anti-Semites". Mr Zuckerberg was soon forced to clarify that he found Holocaust denial "deeply defensive" and did not mean to defend it.
Today, Facebook’s old stance is out of step with its other policies. In March, the company banned false information about Covid-19 on the grounds that it threatened imminent harm, and it has since grown ever more willing to remove posts by politicians and even the US president that misrepresent the voting system or undermine its fairness.
Nevertheless, the company will face a challenge removing Holocaust denial. A report this August by the UK-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that the company’s its algorithms still recommend such content to users who express an interest in the topic.
In 2017 the infamous Holocaust-denying historian David Irving, one of the few people declared racist by a High Court judge, said that interest in his work among young people had "risen exponentially" thanks to YouTube and other online services.
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