From the DW:
“Holocaust survivors urge
Facebook to remove denial posts”
Prominent Holocaust survivors,
including Germany's Charlotte Knobloch, have joined a global campaign to
pressure Facebook to crack down on content that denies the Nazi genocide of
Jews. Holocaust survivors on Wednesday launched an online campaign calling on
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to remove posts from his social media platform
that deny the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews.
The #NoDenyingIt campaign said it
would upload a video featuring a survivor's account every day to Facebook to
lobby for denial posts to be classed as hate speech and banned. Coordinated by the New York-based Conference
on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the videos will also be posted to
Twitter and Facebook-owned Instagram.
Targeting hate speech Zuckerberg, who is himself Jewish, sparked
an outcry in 2018 when he told the tech website Recode that Facebook should not
itself remove posts from Holocaust deniers or block them. He said that he found
such content "deeply offensive," but "at the end of the day, I
don't believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are
things that different people get wrong." Zuckerberg later issued a
clarification following the backlash, saying: "I absolutely didn't intend
to defend the intent of people who deny [the Holocaust]." Under its
policy, Facebook takes down such posts in countries such as Germany, France and
Poland where Holocaust denial is illegal. Elsewhere, content is monitored and
only removed if it breaches the platform's standards, for example by straying
into hate speech or incitement to violence. "We take down any post that celebrates,
defends, or attempts to justify the Holocaust," Facebook told the
Associated Press. "The same goes
for content that mocks Holocaust victims, accuses victims of lying about the
atrocities, spews hate, or advocates for violence against Jewish people in any
way. Posts and articles that deny the Holocaust often violate one or more of these
standards and are removed from Facebook."
'It's a lie, it's libel' The Claims Conference, an association of
Jewish organizations which negotiates compensation claims from Germany for
Holocaust victims, said the #NoDenyingIt project aimed to show that denial of
the genocide violates Facebook's guidelines. "In Germany or in Austria
people go to prison if they deny the Holocaust because they know it's a lie,
it's libel," survivor Eva Schloss told The Associated Press. The
91-year-old's video message for Zuckerberg was posted to the campaign's pages
on Wednesday. Schloss fled her home city Vienna for the Netherlands before the war
— growing up in the same building as Anne Frank; her mother would marry the
famed diarist's father, Otto Frank, after the war — but her family was
eventually rounded up and sent to Auschwitz in 1944. While Schloss and her
mother survived the death camp, her father and brother were killed. "How
can somebody really doubt it? Where are the 6 million people? There are tens of
thousands of photos taken by the Nazis themselves. They were proud of what they
were doing," she said. Facebook has
also come under fire from US civil rights groups, which organized an
advertising boycott of the platform earlier this month. More than 400 brands
signed up to the campaign to push for more concrete steps to block racist posts
and hate speech from the site. Prominent German Jewish leader Charlotte
Knobloch, who survived the Holocaust by going into hiding as a young girl, said
she was participating in the #NoDenyingIt campaign because many younger
generations rely on social media platforms to get their information. Therefore,
social media companies "have a particular responsibility," she told
AP.
^ Facebook censors so many
pointless things every single day yet they refuse to censor when people deny the
Holocaust? That is very stupid. They see no problem going after a non-violent
post, but going after the murder of 6 million men, women and children and
celebrating the people who murdered them doesn’t matter? ^
https://www.dw.com/en/holocaust-survivors-urge-facebook-to-remove-denial-posts/a-54370708
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