Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday clarified comments he made in an interview a day earlier in which he said he did not think Holocaust deniers were "intentionally getting it wrong."
The comments caused an uproar, and Zuckerberg said Thursday he had not intended to defend the intentions of Holocaust deniers.
In the interview with the tech news website Recode published Wednesday, Zuckerberg, himself Jewish, said that while he personally considered Holocaust denial "deeply offensive," he did not believe the social media giant should remove offensive posts as long as they do not attempt to organize harm or attacks. He also said he did not believe Holocaust deniers were "intentionally getting it wrong" and that it was "hard to impugn the intent and understand the intent."
The Anti-Defamation League said Facebook has a "moral and ethical obligation" not to allow people to disseminate Holocaust denial.
Zuckerberg issued a clarification Thursday, saying, "I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive and I absolutely didn't intend to defend the intent of people who deny that."
Zuckerberg's awkward and eyebrow-raising attempt to explain where Facebook draws the line illustrates the complexities social media platforms face as they take on the unwanted role of referee in this age of online misinformation, manipulation and hate speech.
Facebook, with 2.2 billion users, disallows such things as nudity, the selling of guns, credible threats of violence, and direct attacks on people because of their race, sex or sexual orientation.
Hours after Zuckerberg's comments about Holocaust deniers aired on Wednesday, the company announced it would start removing misinformation that could lead to bloodshed. The policy will begin in Sri Lanka and expand to Myanmar, where Facebook users have been accused of inciting anti-Muslim violence.
But beyond those guidelines, there are large gray areas. What exactly qualifies as supporting terrorist groups versus merely posting about them? Or mocking someone's premature death – something that is also prohibited?
If Facebook was to ban Holocaust denial, it might also be called on to prohibit the denial of other historical events, such as the Armenian genocide or the massacre of Native Americans by European colonizers. Facebook argues that this could lead to a slippery slope in which the company would find itself trying to verify the historical accuracy of user posts.
So, where it can, Facebook stays out of policing content.
While thousands of Facebook moderators around the world are assigned to review potentially objectionable content, aided by artificial intelligence, executives like to say the company does not want to become an "arbiter of truth" and instead tries to let users decide for themselves.
This is why fake news is not actually banned from Facebook, though users may see less of it these days thanks to the company's algorithms and third-party fact-checking efforts. Instead, Facebook may label disputed news stories as such and show related content.
YouTube recently started doing this too. Twitter has been even more freewheeling in the content it allows, only recently ramping up a crackdown on hate and abuse.
"Facebook doesn't want to put time and resources to policing content. It's costly and difficult," said Steve Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
"It's a difficult job, I'm sure an emotionally draining job, and given the scale of Facebook, it would take a lot of people to monitor what goes through that platform."
At the same time, Jones said he has his doubts that throwing more moderators – Facebook aims to increase the number from 10,000 to 20,000 this year – and more technology at the problem would make a difference. He said he has no idea how Facebook can fix things.
"If I knew, I'd probably be sitting next to Mr. Zuckerberg asking for a big fat check," he said.
Zeynep Tufekci, a prominent techno-sociologist, said on Twitter that the notion that you can "fight bad speech with good speech" does not really work in a Facebook world, if it ever did.
"Facebook is in over its head," she tweeted Thursday, but she also added that "nobody has a full answer."
Meanwhile, Germany's Justice Ministry said Thursday that in Germany, Facebook must stick to the country's laws, which ban Holocaust denial.
Germany has enforced a law imposing fines of up to 50 million euros ($58 million) on social media sites that fail to remove hateful messages promptly, and has made it clear that Holocaust denial is a punishable crime.
"There must be no place for anti-Semitism. This includes verbal and physical attacks on Jews as well as the denial of Holocaust. The latter is also punishable by us and will be strictly prosecuted," Justice Minister Katarina Barley said Thursday.
A ministry spokesperson said so far there had been no complaints of Facebook violating German law.
Social media networks in Germany must delete or lock obvious criminal content within 24 hours of a filed complaint and other reported content must be resolved by the platform within a week.
"Nobody should defend anyone who denies the Holocaust," tweeted German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, who introduced the Facebook law in his previous job as justice minister.
The Justice Ministry also said that Facebook and other big social media platforms must report by the end of July on how effective they had been in deleting hate messages from their sites.
A Facebook spokesman in Germany referred Reuters to Zuckerberg's clarification Thursday that he had not intended to defend the intentions of people who deny the Holocaust.
Online anti-Semitism has become a "worrying phenomenon" in Germany, a study by the Technical University in Berlin showed this month. The study analyzed more than 300,000 entries on Facebook and other online forums.
The proportion of anti-Semitic content in German social media rose from 7.5% in 2007 to more than 30% in 2017, the study showed.
Josef Schuster, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said the study empirically proved that online anti-Semitism was increasing and becoming more aggressive.
"Because words will eventually be followed by deeds, online anti-Semitism is not virtual but a real threat," Schuster said.
