Facebook and Holocaust denial

Ezra Klein discusses the controversy over Mark Zuckerberg’s explanation why Facebook doesn’t ban Holocaust denial:

The ambiguity over what Facebook is, and thus how it should be governed, is at the core of the latest Facebook controversy. On Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview to Kara Swisher of Recode. In it, he offered the example of Holocaust denialism as an idea that may be wrong but should be permitted to exist on Facebook:

“I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened. 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. . . .”

What is Facebook being when it lets Infowars, or Holocaust deniers, peddle their conspiracies on the site? There are many options here, but let’s consider three:

1) Facebook is an “open platform”: This is the oldest and most common theory of social networks — that they’re neutral spaces where anyone can speak. To some degree, that’s even true: Most anyone can sign up for a Facebook account and blast their missives to friends around the world. In this theory, Facebook can’t start making decisions about which content to permit because then it would be implicitly endorsing all the content it permits.

But at this point in Facebook’s evolution, the “open platform” excuse has long lost its power. Facebook is making critical choices all of the time. The visibility of posts is driven by Facebook’s newsfeed algorithms, the content is governed by Facebook’s code of conduct, and a publisher like Infowars uses a different kind of Facebook page altogether.

2) Facebook is a publisher: If Facebook is a publisher, the way Vox Media or MTV or Condé Nast is, then it bears responsibility for what it publishes. And sometimes Facebook clearly is a publisher: in its new Facebook Watch program, for instance, Facebook is paying other companies to produce video content that Facebook will publish on its new video platform. I don’t expect Facebook to pay Infowars, or any Holocaust deniers, to make a show for Watch.

What’s trickier is whether Facebook is acting as a publisher when it gives corporate entities access to special pages and tools designed to let Facebook host, promote, and advertise against their work. In that case, I think Facebook is acting as a publisher and has a responsibility to see those tools confined to responsible actors, though how to define a responsible actor is difficult, dangerous territory. No one said being a publisher is easy! But so far, Facebook hasn’t taken on this responsibility, at least not to any serious degree.

3) Facebook is a government: With more than 2 billion people using its a service, there’s an argument that the thing Facebook is most like is a government. And governments routinely make trade-offs like prizing free speech, knowing that much of that speech will be abhorrent and even dangerous, recognizing that the gains of open expression are ultimately worth it. A government — at least the US government — would make the decision Zuckerberg is struggling with crisply: Both Infowars and Holocaust denial are permitted because the consequences of their prohibition are more dangerous than their presence.

This is, I think, the closest thing to the model Zuckerberg is mentally operating under . . .

A side point: It’s an unfortunate fact about debates regarding “censorship” that the word is used to describe everything from governmental prior restraints against publication, backed by the threat or actual imposition of state violence, to ever-so gently banning trolls at private blog sites like this one, if they continually break the rules promulgated by LGM’s Old Ones, as well as an almost unlimited number of things somewhere in between.

As to what to do about Holocaust deniers and Facebook, here’s an interesting take from the big history Reddit page Ask-Historians:

Taken together or separately, these beliefs serve one goal: to make the ideas of the Nazis socially acceptable. The Holocaust is the obvious proof that the ideology of National Socialism is, at its core, racist, anti-Semitic, and genocidal. Holocaust denial erases this massive crime to blunt the horror of Nazi ideas as a whole.

The methods we have seen Holocaust deniers use in order to distort, minimize, or outright deny historical facts all demonstrate that they don’t merely “get things wrong.” Denialists in our subreddit will often point to self-proclaimed revisionist historians as their sources. Even the medievalists and classicists among us have by now become familiar with the arguments of David Irving and Fred Leuchter. These alleged historians feign sound historical practices by citing sources, only to leave out key passages, obfuscate facts, and ignore proper historical context. To make their positions less odious at first glance and to fake legitimacy, these deniers claim the attractive title revisionist.

I haven’t delved much into this topic myself, but I do wonder if the distinction being made here and elsewhere between honest error and dishonest propaganda , aka fake news, is too sharp.  One mistake to which intellectuals are prone is to assume that things like factual accuracy and intellectual consistency are important to your average ideologue.  It may well be that to your run of the mill Holocaust denier, the Holocaust is simultaneously a Zionist hoax and the deserved punishment that was meted out to a perfidious race.

Indeed, Holocaust denial need not be and almost certainly isn’t any more internally consistent than anti-Semitism in general, which usually insists that the Jews are both frighteningly all-powerful and disgustingly weak.

Seeing Holocaust denial as a form of honest error, as Zuckerberg’s initial remarks seemed to do, is obviously ridiculous, but seeing it as a self-consciously rational strategy to spread what its advocates know to be lies may just be making an analogous error in the other direction.  Dishonest error might be a more accurate way of describing it — and a lot of other things too.