Facebook has announced it will remove all content on its platform that “denies or distorts the Holocaust.” The company says this expansion of its hate speech policies is a response to what it calls “the well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people.” Facebook has previously faced strong criticism for letting Holocaust denial content spread freely on its platform.
In addition to removing content that denies or distorts the Holocaust, the company says that, starting later this year, it will direct anyone searching on Facebook for terms related to this topic to “credible information” supplied by third-party sources.
“Enforcement of these policies cannot happen overnight. There is a range of content that can violate these policies, and it will take some time to train our reviewers and systems on enforcement,” said Facebook’s VP of content policy, Monika Bickert, in a blog post.
Earlier this year, Facebook said it would ban anti-Semitic stereotypes that depicts Jewish people as “running the world or its major institutions.” But a report a week later by a UK counter-extremism group, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), found that the company’s algorithm “actively promotes” Holocaust denial content.
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