Facebook Promotes Holocaust Denial

^{Via Gatestone Institute}

1. Researchers say that as they viewed Holocaust-denying pages and posts on Facebook, the social media site's algorithm promoted even more Holocaust denial content to them 2. Facebook takes down such posts only in countries such as Germany, France and Poland where Holocaust denial is illegal. 3. As the Institute for Strategic Dialogue out in its report, however, Holocaust denial is not about people getting history "wrong": "This speech seeks not only to minimise the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust, but to mitigate criticism of Nazism, and justify ongoing attacks against the Jewish people. Due to the intimate intersection between Holocaust denial and hate targeting Jews, such content should be regarded as inherently anti-Semitic". 4. Given Facebook's public commitment to fighting "hate speech" on its site, Facebook's refusal to acknowledge international guidelines on anti-Semitic hate speech by reducing Holocaust denial to a mere instance of "getting things wrong" -- while using its algorithms to promote Holocaust denial -- is clearly unacceptable. 5. Holocaust survivors have now launched an online campaign, #NoDenyingIt, calling on Facebook to remove Holocaust denying material from its website. "How can somebody really doubt it?" asked Eva Schloss, a Holocaust survivor. "Where are the six million people? There are tens of thousands of photos taken by the Nazis themselves. They were proud of what they were doing." Facebook has been promoting Holocaust denial on its platform, according to a recent report by The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), "Hosting the 'Holohoax': A Snapshot of Holocaust Denial Across Social Media". "Holocaust denial has long been one of the most insidious conspiracy theories targeting Jewish communities, with its extremist proponents drawn from across the ideological spectrum, from extreme right-wing to hard left to Islamist", the report states. "Research has shown that digital platforms have only served to amplify and mainstream this warped strain of thinking in recent years". Researchers from ISD gathered posts using the keyword "holohoax" from between June 1, 2018 and July 22, 2020 on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and YouTube. According to ISD: "The term 'holohoax' is popular among Holocaust deniers. It was selected as it is a particularly explicit means of denying the Holocaust. A significant amount of Holocaust denial content is couched in careful language, codes and tropes, and thus it is highly likely that this analysis only shows the tip of the iceberg of the true extent to which such content is able to spread on social media". ISD's researchers identified at least 36 Facebook pages and groups that were either specifically dedicated to Holocaust denial or that host Holocaust denial content. The Facebook pages and groups had a combined number of followers of 366,068 and an average number of members of 10,168. Full Article by Judith Bergman @ Gatestone Institute