Holocaust survivors urge Facebook to remove denial posts

BERLIN — Holocaust survivors around the world are lending their voices to a campaign launched Wednesday targeting Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg, urging him to take action to remove denial of the Nazi genocide from the social media site. Coordinated by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the #NoDenyingIt campaign uses Facebook itself to make the survivors’ entreaties to Zuckerberg heard, posting one video per day urging him to remove Holocaust-denying groups, pages and posts as hate speech. After an outcry, Zuckerberg, who is Jewish himself, clarified that while he personally found “Holocaust denial deeply offensive” he believed that “the best way to fight offensive bad speech is with good speech.” Since then, Facebook representatives have met with the Claims Conference but the group, which negotiates compensation payments from Germany for Holocaust victims, says Zuckerberg himself has refused to. Posts and articles that deny the Holocaust often violate one or more of these standards and are removed from Facebook.” Earlier this month, a two-year audit of Facebook’s civil rights record found “serious setbacks” that have marred the social network’s progress on matters such as hate speech, misinformation and bias. On one, “Real World War 2 History,” administrators are clearly aware of the fine line between what is and isn’t allowed, listing among its rules that members must “avoid posts that feature grotesque cartoons that FB censors can construe as racist or hateful.” Another page, the “Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust,” features regular posts of revisionist videos, including one from February in which the commentator says the Zyklon B gas used to kill Jews in Nazi death camps was actually employed to kill the lice that spread typhus, claiming “this chemical was used to improve the inmates’ health and reduce, not increase, camp mortality.” Though not overtly advocating attacks, such postings are meant to “perpetuate a myth, anti-Semitic tropes that somehow Jews made this up in order to gain sympathy or political advantage” and could easily incite violence, Schneider said.