Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg On Holocaust Denials

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been criticized for comments on Holocaust denial content on Facebook.

Zuckerberg was discussing Facebook’s policy on content moderation during an interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher and stated, “I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened. I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take them down because I think that there are things that different people get wrong.”

Zuckerberg’s comments provoked intense backlash from many sources, including Anti-Defamation League chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt who stated, “Holocaust denial is a willful, deliberate, and longstanding deception tactic by anti-Semites that is incontrovertibly hateful, hurtful, and threatening to Jews. Facebook has a moral and ethical obligation not to allow its dissemination.”

Zuckerberg later emailed Recode in an attempt to clarify his statements. He reiterated that he finds Holocaust deniers “deeply offensive” and that Facebook would remove any content that advocated for “violence or hatred against a particular group.”

There has been a lot of debate recently around what social platforms have the right to remove from their pages, and many believe that Facebook’s lack of action against hate groups is emboldening them.