Facebook is banning Holocaust denial as Zuckerberg says his 'thinking has evolved'

Facebook is changing course and banning Holocaust denial from its platform.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Monday that the company is "updating our hate speech policy to ban Holocaust denial." Previously, Facebook had only taken down posts that "praise hate crimes or mass murder, including the Holocaust," as Zuckerberg explained. It was a reversal for Facebook after Zuckerberg in a 2018 interview controversially defended allowing Holocaust denial to remain up.

"I'm Jewish, and there's a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened," Zuckerberg told Recode. "I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don't believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong."

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Zuckerberg on Monday said Facebook was making the decision to "prohibit any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust" amid "rising anti-Semitism." He also said that those who search for the Holocaust on Facebook will soon be directed to information on it from authoritative sources.

"I've struggled with the tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused by minimizing or denying the horror of the Holocaust," Zuckerberg said on Monday. "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."

This decision from Facebook comes after last month, NBC News reported that a disturbing survey found "just 90 percent of respondents said they believed that the Holocaust happened," as well as that "sixty-three percent of those surveyed did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust." In a blog on Monday, Facebook Vice President of Content Policy Monika Bickert said the new ban is "supported by the well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust."