Content that “denies or distorts the Holocaust” will be banned from the Facebook Inc. platform, but other genocide denials won’t.

The move, announced today, is an about-face for Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg (pictured), who has been criticized in the past for not being bold enough to remove such content. In 2018, Zuckerberg said in an interview that while he found Holocaust denial “deeply offensive,” he believed people had the right to discuss their point of view.

That attitude apparently has now changed. In a blog post published today, Facebook said that as part of a wider crackdown on hate speech and the spread of misinformation, any content denying the Holocaust ever happened or distorting the facts about the Holocaust will be removed.

“Our decision is supported by the well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people,” said Facebook. “According to a recent survey of adults in the U.S. aged 18-39, almost a quarter said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, that it had been exaggerated or they weren’t sure.”

The company said enforcement of the new policies will be a slow process as reviewers and systems are trained to detect such content. If people do start looking for Holocaust information on the platform they will now be directed to “credible information.”

On his own Facebook page, Zuckerberg wrote that the decision wasn’t easy. “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 said. “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.”

The new policies won’t affect denial of the Armenian genocide, an atrocity that has been denied by the Turkish government. Turkey, a country that has the 12^th biggest number of Facebook users in the world, had for years spent millions lobbying the U.S. government before the genocide was officially recognized by the Senate in 2019. Facebook’s policies also won’t affect content relating to Rwandan genocide denial.

Photo: Alessio Jacona/Flickr