Holocaust survivors launched a campaign on Wednesday to implore Facebook to rank posts denying the Nazi genocide of 6 million European Jews during World War II as hate speech and to remove them from the networking platform. social.
The campaign began the same day that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with CEOs of Amazon, Google and Apple, testified before Congress at a landmark hearing on antitrust concerns.
The #NoDenyingIt campaign was coordinated by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) and uses Facebook to send the survivors’ pleas to Zuckerberg. Starting Wednesday, one video per day will be published urging Zuckerberg to remove the groups, pages, and posts that deny the Holocaust.
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The videos will also be posted on Instagram, owned by Facebook, and on Twitter. Highlights include Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, Anne Frank’s stepsister Eve Schloss, Kristallnacht survivor Charlotte Knobloch, and Auschwitz survivor Roman Kent, the head of the American Meeting of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, the Jerusalem Post reported.
Facebook said in a statement that it removes Holocaust denial posts in countries where it is illegal, such as Germany, France and Poland. In countries where it is not a crime, such as the United States and Great Britain, they are carefully monitored.
“In Germany or Austria, people go to prison if they deny the Holocaust because they know it’s a lie, it’s defamation,” said Schloss, a 91-year-old Auschwitz survivor who now lives in London.
In this April 10, 2018 photo, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a joint hearing of the Commerce and Judiciary Committees on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo / Andrew Harnik)
“How can anyone really doubt it? Where are the 6 million people? There are tens of thousands of photos taken by the Nazis themselves. They were proud of what they were doing. They don’t deny it, they know they did, ”he told the Associated Press.
Schloss’s family escaped before the war from Vienna to the Netherlands, where they became friends with Anne Frank, who lived nearby in Amsterdam and was the same age. After the German army invaded the country, the Schloss and Frank families went into hiding, but were discovered by the Nazis separately in 1944, the Schloss family betrayed by a Dutch woman.
Schloss and his mother survived Auschwitz, but his father and brother were killed, while Otto Frank, Anne’s father, was the only survivor in his immediate family and married Schloss’s mother after the war. Otto Frank published his daughter’s now famous diary, and Schloss has written his own story and would like to tell Zuckerberg his own experience.
Facebook told AP that the social media platform “removes any post that celebrates, defends, or attempts to justify the Holocaust.”
“The same is true of any content that mocks Holocaust victims, accuses them of lying about atrocities, casts hatred or advocates violence against the Jewish people in any way. Posts and articles that deny the Holocaust often violate one or more of these standards and are removed from Facebook, “the statement read.
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This photo taken on Tuesday, July 28, 2020 from an undated video shows former chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Charlotte Knobloch, recording a message for Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook. Knobloch is a Holocaust survivor living in Munich today. (Conference of Jewish Claims via AP)
Holocaust survivors are also seeking to personally sit down with Zuckerberg to explain the impact of publications denying the historic event.
Zuckerberg said he believed some were “not intentionally” wrong and that as long as the posts did not call for harm or violence, even offensive content should be protected. Zuckerberg later clarified that while he personally found that “Holocaust denial is deeply offensive,” he believed that “the best way to combat bad offensive speech is with good speech.”
His comments sparked criticism from the Claims Conference, a group that negotiates Germany’s compensation payments for Holocaust victims, which decided earlier this month to launch the campaign after a two-year audit of Facebook’s civil rights registry I discovered “serious setbacks” that have tarnished the progress of the social network on issues such as hate speech, misinformation and bias.
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On July 1, more than 500 companies started an advertising boycott to pressure Facebook to take a firmer stand against hate speech.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
