Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Says Holocaust & Sandy Hook Deniers ‘Deserve A Voice’
People who are looking to Facebook to provide them with less “fake news” than before are going to be sorely disappointed in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s latest proclamation.
According to the New York Daily News, the Facebook CEO has made clear that his platform will not ban people considered to be “conspiracy pushers and hoax peddlers,” because Zuckerberg believes they “deserve a voice.”
That means that people who believe that Sandy Hook was a false flag attack made up of so-called “crisis actors” and Holocaust deniers — two of the biggest “conspiracy pusher” groups on the social platform — can feel free to share stories that shore up their claims.
Furthermore, Zuckerberg went on to say that he doesn’t believe that his company should remove what he considers “questionable content,” because he doesn’t know if the person’s intent was malicious when they shared the article.
Citing the fact that he, himself, is Jewish, Zuckerberg said that even though he finds Holocaust deniers — as an example — offensive, he won’t stop them from saying what they want on his platform. He said that “different people get different things wrong,” and he can’t confirm that they were “intentionally” wrong.
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Kara Swisher, who interviewed the Facebook CEO, pointed out to him that sowing the seeds of doubt in people’s minds is the “exact aim” of Holocaust deniers.
In a statement, the Anti-Defamation League also repeated Swisher’s statements, adding that denying the Holocaust was real is a “willful, deliberate and longstanding deception tactic by anti-Semites,” and encouraged Facebook to prohibit the dissemination of such literature.
But when presented with this, Zuckerberg doubled down on his claims, saying that “people get it wrong,” and that even if people get things wrong multiple times, they shouldn’t be prohibited from speaking.
Instead, he said, the most his company is willing to do is move the offending “news” to the person’s personal, rather than business, pages. He also said that he wouldn’t allow the stuff to be featured on the main News Feed.
The Facebook CEO is currently under fire for allowing the Alex-Jones-run site Info Wars to remain on the social platform. Jones is currently facing a class action lawsuit from the parents of the children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, because beginning in 2012, Jones began spreading the first of the “Sandy Hook denier” conspiracy theories that suggested that those who were killed were merely “crisis actors.”
The Facebook CEO is also under fire because he vowed before Congress, in April of 2018, that his company would combat disinformation, but his statements made to Swisher directly contradict his testimony.
