Facebook recently released the news that they are going to ban Holocaust denial posts on its social media platform.
The website has, on multiple occasions, been criticised for not filtering the content on its website, with it being one of the biggest and fastest-spreading outlets for ‘‘fake news’’. Banning Holocaust-denying posts will not only prevent false information from being spread but also, hopefully, prevent its users from committing hate crimes.
The website has previously been reluctant to ban topics as they ‘‘struggled with the tension’’ between freedom of speech and banning these posts. Although they have previously restricted what is allowed to be discussed on their website, such as posts and pictures regarding ‘‘blackface’’ and other common anti-Semitic topics and stereotypes, denying the Holocaust has not been one of these topics until now.
Although the founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has always found these posts offensive, as he is himself Jewish, he has also argued that people had a right to publish whatever they wanted and that they weren’t ‘‘intentionally’’ getting the facts wrong.
But as the news of the new ban of the topic was released, Zuckerberg wrote a public Facebook post commenting on their new policies:
‘‘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 wrote in his Facebook post.
He continued the Facebook post by saying that this is the right move ‘‘with the current state of the world’’.
Written by Alice Sjöberg
Image courtesy of William Iven via Unsplash. Image license can be found here. This image has not been altered.