Facebook, finally enacting a measure long called on by critics, said it will prohibit any content that “denies or distorts the Holocaust.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a post Monday announcing the policy change, said he has “struggled with the tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused by minimizing 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,” Zuckerberg 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.”
The social-media giant made the decision based on the “well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people,” Monika Bickert, Facebook’s VP of content policy, wrote in a blog post Monday. She noted that Facebook also recently banned anti-Semitic stereotypes “about the collective power of Jews that often depicts them running the world or its major institutions.”
Bickert specifically cited a recent survey of U.S. adults 18-39 that found almost one-fourth said they believed the Holocaust either was a myth, that it had been exaggerated or they weren’t sure it actually happened. About 63% of respondents did not know that 6 million Jews were exterminated by the Nazi regime and 36% thought the number was “2 million or fewer” per the survey, commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
Starting later n 2020, Facebook will direct users who search for terms associated with the Holocaust or its denial to “credible information” from third-party sources, according to Bickert.
Facebook’s announcement that it is banning Holocaust denial content comes after it was targeted by the Stop Hate for Profit campaign, launched by groups including the NAACP, Common Sense Media and the Anti-Defamation League. The initiative was joined by hundreds of companies who pledged to suspend advertising on Facebook-owned platforms temporarily, with the goal of spurring the company to more aggressively block hate speech on its services.
To date, Facebook has banned more than 250 white supremacist organizations and last week prohibited all content from groups affiliated with QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy and disinformation movement that has sprung up on the last three years. In the second quarter of 2020, Facebook removed 22.5 million pieces of hate speech from its platform in the second quarter of this year.
Meanwhile, Facebook still has a major misinformation problem — and in fact, users are engaging in misleading or false information today more than they did leading up to the 2016 U.S. election, according to a new study from public policy think tank German Marshall Fund. The study found that overall on Facebook, likes, comments and shares of articles from news outlets that regularly publish misinformation roughly tripled from Q3 of 2016 to the third quarter of 2020, as per the New York Times.