Mark Zuckerberg Tried to Defend Facebook, Accidentally Sticks Up for Holocaust Denial
When something as ubiquitous as Facebook makes the news, it's rarely for something good. For evidence, we only need look back a few month to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Or the news that the platform was saving user media that they never even saved. Or Facebook's unfortunate role in propagating fake news and troll stories during the 2016 election. Or, most distressing of all, the discovery that horrific ethnic violence in Myanmar was being driven via Facebook posts whipping people into a frenzy.
So Mark Zuckerberg has a lot to answer for these days. And the answers he has are deeply unsatisfying. In a long interview with Recode, Kara Swisher pushed Zuckerberg on where the company draws the line on what posts it chooses to delete outright versus simply making it harder to find on a user's newsfeed. Zuckerberg asserts that in situations like Myanmar, where it's clear that the posts are meant to incite physical violence, their stance is unequivocally to get rid of the content. But for anything less explicit, he gets fuzzy, saying that it's not the company's role to police debate. In response, Swisher brings up Facebook's refusal to remove content by the conspiracy-peddling site InfoWars:
[Swisher:] Okay. “Sandy Hook didn’t happen” is not a debate. It is false. You can’t just take that down?
[Zuckerberg:] I agree that it is false. I also think that going to someone who is a victim of Sandy Hook and telling them, “Hey, no, you’re a liar”—that is harassment, and we actually will take that down. But overall, let’s take this whole closer to home... I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened. I find that 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. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong, but I think—
In the case of the Holocaust deniers, they might be, but go ahead.
It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent. I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly. I’m sure you do. I’m sure a lot of leaders and public figures we respect do too, and I just don’t think that it is the right thing to say, “We’re going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times.” What we will do is we’ll say, “Okay, you have your page, and if you’re not trying to organize harm against someone, or attacking someone, then you can put up that content on your page, even if people might disagree with it or find it offensive.” But that doesn’t mean that we have a responsibility to make it widely distributed in News Feed.
This argument is extremely disappointing, particularly since Zuckerberg has chosen a conspiracy theory—Holocaust denial—that's deeply anti-Semitic and intrinsically tied to violence. There is no good faith argument against the existence of the Holocaust, as Swisher rightly points out. But, presumably because free will exists, Zuckerberg can't say so with omniscient certainty, so, it stays.
Disappointing or no, it's of a piece with Facebook's insistence that it can't remove far-right pages like InfoWars. And according to a new Channel 4 documentary, Facebook's moderators often refuse to remove content that counts as hate speech. That same Channel 4 documentary, Inside Facebook: Secrets of the Social Network, features an interview with early Facebook investor Roger McNamee. According to McNamee, extremism is profitable for the company:
"Facebook understood that it was desirable to have people spend more time on site if you're going to have an advertising-based business," he said. "It's the really extreme, really dangerous form of content that attracts the most highly engaged people on the platform."
So, from that perspective, it's less about whether or not we can divine exactly why someone would claim that the Holocaust never happened. Instead, the bigger concern for Facebook is just how ravenously the Holocaust denier's followers give the website clicks.
