Facebook Has Finally Banned Holocaust Denial. Critics Ask What Took Them So Long

The move reverses Facebooks previous stance, which was articulated by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in years of interviews as not wanting his company to be an arbiter of truth.

Our decision is supported by the well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people, said Facebooks vice president of content policy, Monika Bickert, in a statement.

Although Facebook has over the past few years gradually imposed new guidelines on hate speech and content that the company defines as having the potential to incite violence, it has until recently largely stayed away from making decisions about individual conspiracy theories or claims to truth. The first sign of a shift came as the coronavirus pandemic spread around the world, when Facebook announced it would limit the spread of COVID-19 misinformation on its platform.

7, the company announced it would ban QAnon, a sprawling, false conspiracy with anti-Semitic elements that says President Trump is bringing an elite cabal of child-molesters to justice.

The fact that Zuckerberg has finally, after years of advocacy from anti-hate groups like the ADL and others, accepted that Holocaust denial is a blatant anti-Semitic tactic is, of course, a good thing. They could retrain their algorithms to focus on a metric other than engagement, and they could build in guardrails to stop certain content from going viral before being reviewed.

Original article