‘Will ban any post that denies or distorts the Holocaust’: Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday announced that the social media giant will ban any post that “denies or distorts” the Holocaust, a mass genocide carried out by the Nazi forces.

“If people search for the Holocaust on Facebook, we’ll start directing you to authoritative sources to get accurate information,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.

“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 added.

The 36-year-old referred to data showing rise of anti-Semitic violence over the year and said that Facebook has been updating its hate speech policies at par with them.

The ban on Holocaust denial posts comes amid a push by the survivours of the mass genocide around the world, who launched the #NoDenyingIt campaign on Facebook itself, news agency AP reported. The campaign urged Zuckerberg to remove Holocaust-denying posts, groups and pages, marking them as hate speech.

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany had coordinated the campaign, posting one video per day urging Zuckerberg to take actions against such people or posts, AP reported.

The Holocaust, carried out by the Adolf Hitler-led Nazi Party in Germany between 1941 and 1945, killed around six million Jews, making it the biggest mass genocide of all times.