Last month, Mark Zuckerberg defended Holocaust deniers, stating in an interview that he doesn’t “think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong”, and in turn, Facebook shouldn’t take down the dangerously false content. The platform did, however, temporarily remove a post advocating for Holocaust education from the Anne Frank Center yesterday.
These numbers are alarming, but this is why we do what we do. Currently only 10 states mandate Holocaust and Genocide Education. How do we counter ignorance about the Holocaust with knowledge, compassion, and understanding? https://t.co/1xtsNLAKEx
— Anne Frank Center (@AnneFrankCenter) August 21, 2018
“These numbers are alarming, but this is why we do what we do,” the post read, according to a tweet from the Anne Frank Center. “Currently only 10 states mandate Holocaust and Genocide Education. How do we counter ignorance about the Holocaust with knowledge, compassion, and understanding?”
The post, which Facebook later restored, included a photo of Jewish children, stripped of their clothes, at a concentration camp.
“We don’t allow nude images of children on FB, but we know this is an important image of historical significance and we’ve restored it,” Facebook wrote in response to the Anne Frank Center’s tweet pointing out the removal. “We’re sorry and thank you for bringing it to our attention.”
The post was published on August 22. The Anne Frank Center was informed on Tuesday, nearly a week later, that it had been removed, and it reached out to Facebook immediately after they were notified. A spokesperson for the organisation told Gizmodo that they didn’t hear back from Facebook until they publicised the removal yesterday.
“We understand the difficulty in assessing the context of potentially controversial content,” Alexandra Devitt, a spokesperson for the Anne Frank Center, told Gizmodo in an email. “That said, it shouldn’t have taken us publicly calling out Facebook to restore our post. Hopefully, Facebook can revise their protocols.”
Facebook spokesperson Sarah Pollack reiterated the company’s mistake in removing the Anne Frank Center post in an email to Gizmodo and explained that it will make exceptions to its content policy if an offending post is “newsworthy, significant or important to the public interest”.
Read the article by Melanie Ehrenkranz on Gizmodo (from TechCrunch).