Will Facebook follow Obama's lead on Holocaust denial?
I wonder how management at Facebook might have reacted should they have come across some of President Obama's words Friday.
The president was speaking at the Buchenwald concentration camp, one of whose sub-camps, Ohrdruf, was liberated by his own great uncle. And he made sure to express his own feelings very clearly on a subject that Facebook believes should freely be discussed, Holocaust denial.
"To this day, there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened--a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful," he said. "This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts, a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history."
Facebook's defense for allowing Holocaust denial groups on its site centers around the notion that Holocaust denial is not, in itself, hateful. The company insists that, although it finds Holocaust denial "repulsive and ignorant," Holocaust denial groups do not contravene its terms of service.
Facebook's terms are very clearly written: "You will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence."
So the president says Holocaust denial is, by its very definition, hateful, while Facebook insists it is not.
However, just the briefest visit to one Facebook group, Holohoax, produces wall posts such as this: "Jews are pretty good liars most of the time, but they tell so many lies they are bound to trip themselves up sometimes. Their exaggerations, half-truths, and outright inventions about the so-called "Holocaust," easily the most lied-about topic ever, are a good example."
Such groups are generally small. Holohoax has 40 members, whereas a newer counter-group, United Against Holocaust Denial on Facebook, has more than 40,000.
However, in light of the president's comments, might Facebook decide to apply its own terms of service against many groups, not just Holocaust denial groups, that seem to have only a hateful purpose?
Here's just one example: "I Hate Muslims in Oz."
Surely this group, by its very name, just might have fallen foul of Facebook's hateful content rule.
Should Facebook decide to make a stand for its own terms of service, it would not be an affront to free speech. It would be a statement about what kind of brand Facebook chooses to be.
eBay and Yahoo made a clear and simple stand against the sale of Nazi memorabilia on their sites. And this was in 2001. Both companies decided they simply didn't want to be associated with that kind of thing.
Of course, Facebook could also decide to change its terms of service and remove the stricture against hateful posts. That would also make things clear.
Chris Matyszczyk is an award-winning creative director who advises major corporations on content creation and marketing. He brings an irreverent, sarcastic, and sometimes ironic voice to the tech world. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
However, I think that the freedom of speech to publicly say whatever you like is paramount.
If a group of people want to gather and discuss talk about how the "Holocaust did not happen", or "Proof that there is no God", discuss "conspiracy theories", or whatever they should have the right to believe and say whatever they want.
Why there would be a call to arms for less rights is beyond me.
Facebook is a private company, on private servers, with private rules. People can either abide by what is appropriate, or they can have their accounts and content removed by Facebook.
Just like you can't yell "BOMB" on a plane, you cannot espouse hatred on Facebook (well, you can if you hate Jews, but according to their TOS, you can't)
On the other hand, FaceBook is a private enterprise and can make up any rule it likes, so long as its rules aren't illegal in and of themselves. So, let them do what they like.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Benjamin Franklin
Anyone who wants to is free to speak on any subject they like. That is not what's being discussed here.
People are free to say whatever they want, but they are NOT free to use OTHER PEOPLE'S money, resources, equipment, networks, or computers to do it. I am free to speak my mind, but I am NOT free to walk into my local TV station and demand that they put me on the air. They own the station, they own the transmitters, they own the cameras; it's their choice what to put on.
Similarly, people are free to say whatever they want, but they are NOT free to insist that Facebook allow them to say it on Facebook servers using Facebook network resources.
If Facebook wants to say that you can not discuss turtles on their system, or you can't talk about baking pancakes, or you can't talk about Holocaust denial, that does not infringe freedom of speech. As long as Facebook owns those servers and that bandwidth, if you want to use their equipment you follow their rules. People who want to spout nonsense like Holocaust denial are free to do so on other networks, or set up Web sites of their own.
Folks, this is really, really basic. Telling you that you can't use my equipment to talk about what you want is not censorship. It does not violate freedom of speech. It only becomes a free speech issue if you are forbidden to talk about it at all, even using your own resources.
It's depressing how many otherwise intelligent people don't understand that.
"It shall only be these individuals who will be willing - and capable - to change the world in a significant way... To redress the imbalance caused by the Jew and their hubristic sycophants and restore this earth to a state of cosmic harmony. "
So to reiterate, the majority who deny the holocaust are usually members of HATE GROUPS!
If we want to get down this far into the weeds, I'm sure facebook could create a division to scan "questionable" groups such as these and manually remove hate posts as they come up. But I think what everyone is saying is that it would be better to just remove the groups themselves completely, even if every single sentance of text in that group isn't hateful.
Until recently, I also believed that only Jew-haters had any sort of motive to want to revise the Holocaust. I had, like so many, been aware that there were revisionist accounts but hesitated both out of skepticism--I couldn't believe that the mainstream narratives could be so wrong--and reluctance to associate myself with something that is invariably ascribed to racists and bigots alone. Do racists and bigots reject the mainstream historical narrative of the holocaust? They do, but not simply because they want to, but for the same reason they tend to believe that the earth revolves around the sun--the evidence is compelling. Shall we therefore reject the heliocentric model of our solar system too?
My own awakening came after learning of the work of Jewish Canadian revisionist scholar David Cole, whose videotaped tour of Auschwitz was one of the most fascinating and eyeopening things I have ever watched. Learning subsequently that David Cole renounced his revisionist work as a result of death threats made against him by the Jewish Defense League (a terrorist group according to the FBI--they have plotted to bomb mosques and even a US congressman's office)I realized that the only reason for such actions by the JDL and by those governments that have imprisoned revisionist scholars for simply talking about the issue is that the traditional account of the holocaust rests on a precariously thin body of evidence that grows thinner every year as mainstream historians are themselves forced to revise things like the number of Jewish people killed and the existence of gas chambers at several camps where they were once claimed to exist but no longer.
I discovered that not even supporters of the traditional narrative claim any longer that the bodies of Jewish victims were used to make lampshades or soap as I was taught as a child. Why, I wondered, would these stories have to have been invented if in fact the Nazi's crimes were already so awful?
It must be made clear that the revisionist case does not state that the Nazis were good people or that Hitler was not a racist and cruel dictator. The issue is one of scale--were the crimes committed by the losers of WW2 any worse than those committed by the victors? Was the "final solution" to the "Jewish question" proposed by Hitler's Germany the extermination of the world's Jews or was it their expulsion from Europe? Were the deaths in the concentration camps which no one denies were harsh centers of forced labor really a result of homicidal gas chambers or the result of diseases like typhus, for which reason Zyklon B gas was used to kill the lice that spread the disease? What evidence is there in support of the traditional narrative? Have you ever looked for it?
The reason for the distortion and exaggerration of the extent of the Nazis' war crimes was to create a sacred myth that would place the suffering of Jewish people above that of all other victims of WW2 and thus lend support both externally and internally to the new European colonial outpost, Israel, which was formed at the expense of the lives of those who had previously inhabited the "promised land".
One of my secretaries, in 1966, was from Stuttgart and lived her war years on a farm with her grandparents because the times in the larger cities were extremely dangerous. Unfortunately, some of the farm workers came from the camps and they expressed their fears about returning to the camps to her grandparents.
Germans were not all Nazis and a good many citizens only joined the Nazi party because it meant a job during a very tough, economic time. If you were to read your history of the depression years, in the United States, you might get a glint of how bad things can really be. Most people will do almost anything to have food on the table and a roof over their heads.
Your prorogation of this kind of dribble is disgusting and I would hope that my response is not the only one you will be getting. Suffice to say that regardless of what your rant, the evidence is clear and will not be changed due to your opiinion.
F**** Israel and their Holocaust Bulls****
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=51205976791
1,082 members
6,000,000 for the TRUTH about the Holocaust
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=41468950747
439 members
Holocaust is a myth
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=81989559933
380 members
**** Israel And Their Holocaust ********
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=41610504185
123 members
Additionally, there are many threads in many groups which are promoting hatred, genocide, and terrorism which are full of Holocaust denial. Most of those threads can be found in many anti-Israel groups which have 10's of thousands of members.
All that said, thank you for mentioning and linking to our United Against Holocaust Denial On Facebook" group.
It has to do with hatred.
Plenty of people dare to criticize Jews.
Meanwhile, Jews are usually on the front lines defending other people from hatred.
Many Jews themselves are behind these backwards stands at Facebook.
One woman called Bill Clinton a "**************" and she was detained by the Secret Service (Police???) in Chicago. So you just go right ahead and take a vacation on the Administration.
On the other hand, FaceBook is a private enterprise and can make up any rule it likes, so long as its rules aren't illegal in and of themselves. So, let them do what they like.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Benjamin Franklin
If I'm not mistaken, censorship and intimidation were just a few of the things that made the Holocaust possible.
In short, if you don't like Facebook's policy stop using their service and tell them why.
That is the goal of the holocaust deniers. Tell the lie often enough and it will eventually take root, just like the lies and whispers that claim...
1. Jews were warned to stay home from work on 9/11/2001.
2. The United States government carried out the demolition of the World Trader Center towers.
3. George Bush ordered the New Orleans levies blown up.
Denying historical fact is, indeed, an act of hate that has been used to attack various groups and prop up governments for millennia. To this day the government of Turkey denies that the Armenian genocide took place. The United States government tries to avoid any discussion of the atrocities perpetrated against the native peoples of North America during the expansionist years of the country. The list goes on. Every family, every country, every culture, every government has skeletons in the closet they don't want others to know about.
That's why these groups need to be censored and exposed for the haters they are.
http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM
And that's just regarding the collapse of the buildings in New York.
Other people who disbelieve the official 9/11 story as accepted by the cOmission Report include:
Asst. secretary of the treasury under Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts. Former CIA analyst and presidential daily briefer Ray McGovern. And John Lear, son of Bill Lear (founder of the Learjet co.). Republican Arizona state senator Karen Johnson. And former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. And former German defense minister Andreas von Bulow. And Japanese senator Yushika Fujita. And former Italian president Francesco Cossiga, who exposed part of Operation Gladio (if you're not familiar with Gladio, google it).
By the way, the biggest 9/11 group on facebook is a "never forget" group with 37,000 members, but there's another facebook group which is catching up with almost 28,000 members: "9/11 Truth Movement."
9/11 Truth Now!
PatriotsQuestion911.Com
PilotsFor911Truth.org
ae911truth.org
However, I do beleive that the holocaust is an exagerated and totally distorted event!
I don't beleive 6 million jews died, i'm sorry this is just not logical and makes absolutely no sense!!
one more thing, according to the things i see every day, how ppl live and how they nations treat each other, makes a lot of sense and is very logic to understand that there was an holocaust.
To the point: free speech should triumph here.. I can understand why Facebook might ban violent groups from their servers, but I hope they don't cave in to politically correct facism and ban holocaust deniers, or any other conspiracy theorists, ridiculous as they are.
- by heavyhedonist June 7, 2009 7:22 AM PDT
- What I got from this article was a challenge, a question really, and a fairly ridiculous one at that-- do I think that when the president of my country declares something to be hate speech, it is? And my answer is no, there are channels to go through, and frankly I hope this won't make it through them. If there's a wasp in the room, I like to be able to see it, and see where it's going.
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