Facebook Announces New Policy Prohibiting Holocaust Denial

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Facebook will begin banning any content that “denies or distorts the Holocaust,” the company said in a statement Monday.

“Today we’re updating our hate speech policy to ban Holocaust denial,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post on the platform. “We’ve long taken down posts that praise hate crimes or mass murder, including the Holocaust. But with rising anti-Semitism, we’re expanding our policy to prohibit any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust as well. If people search for the Holocaust on Facebook, we’ll start directing you to authoritative sources to get accurate information.

“I’ve struggled with the tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused by minimizing or denying the horror of the Holocaust,” he added. “My own thinking has evolved as I’ve seen data showing an increase in anti-Semitic violence, as have our wider policies on hate speech. Drawing the right lines between what is and isn’t acceptable speech isn’t straightforward, but with the current state of the world, I believe this is the right balance.”

The policy marks a reversal of long-standing precedent. The company has declined to remove such content in the past, with Zuckerberg saying in a 2018 interview that he didn’t believe many users were acting maliciously. “I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong,” Zuckerberg said at the time.

The platform has faced increasing growing over the course of the 2020 election — particularly from left-leaning users — to censor more content. The website began putting warning labels on some content from President Donald Trump earlier this year in the wake of protests by Facebook employees over Trump’s messages.