Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, on Monday, announced that the company's social media platform is updating its hate speech policy to ban Holocaust denial. The company will start directing users to credible sources if users search for information about the holocaust later this year.
Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post that the company has taken down posts that promote or praise hate crimes, mass murder, including the holocaust. " with rising anti-Semitism, we're expanding our policy to prohibit any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust as well," Zuckerberg's post further read.
Facebook took the decision after Holocaust survivors started a social media campaign under the hashtag #NoDenyingIt to urge the social media company to take action against the posts that deny the holocaust.
The World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee praised Facebook's decision and said that the move followed by ongoing conversations with the company. "For several years, the World Jewish Congress has advocated for Facebook to remove Holocaust denial content from its platform, and has worked with the social media company's policy teams to review such posts and classify them as hate speech under the company's community standards," the organization said in a statement.
According to Zuckerberg, who's Jewish by faith, the new policy will strike a "right balance" in defining the lines between what is and what's not accepted as free speech.
"I've struggled with the tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused by minimizing or denying the horror of the Holocaust," read Zuckerberg's post
Earlier, in August, Facebook had banned certain 'anti-Semitic' conspiracy theories and stereotypes.
Mark Zuckerberg said that enforcement of its new policies would not "happen overnight."
"There is a range of content that can violate these policies, and it will take some time to train our reviewers and systems on enforcement," Zuckerberg's Facebook post read.