Facebook’s Policy Banning Holocaust Denial. Progress Not Victory.

 Jonathan Vick, International Network Against Cyber Hate, North American Representative 

Facebook has announced it is banning Holocaust denial in an apparent extension of its ongoing policy adjustments regarding hate speech and anti-Semitism.  Not surprisingly, a number of organizations who have been lobbying Facebook, each for varying lengths of time, are claiming credit for influencing Facebook’s actions.   Every success in advancing action against hate speech and destructive distortions is progress against hate.  This victory however, lives within a saga of failures.

After years of lobbying, debating, arguing with internet platforms, it is gratifying to have seen many platforms take positions against civil corrosion. It is critical to remember that Facebook’s actions, like Twitter, YouTube, and others, are only the actions of individual platforms. These antihate policies are often characterized by critics as a capitulation to the existing power structures, government, media, banking, or culture. This unfairly throws into question what are genuine efforts to confront a thorny issue.

Ultimately the only commonality for platforms comes from people moving between them to change jobs.   The industry’s lack of a cohesive humanitarian-based baseline set of standards is unquestionably used to exploit the internet for hateful purposes.

Our intuition that the democracy of the internet would create a self-correcting system led us to seemingly reasonable, but ultimately false assumptions. Part of that fallacy is that the internet was the ultimate competitive environment. No need for oversight, regulation, or coordination of any sort. That did not work exactly as planned. The power of truth is real. But supporting the truth is not a spectator sport, and the internet is overwhelmingly a spectator environment. Equally, hate is not spectator pursuit, but it is obvious that a lot more people are willing to play at hate than at truth.

Rather than marshalling the armies of reviewers, acting in collaboration, or accepting some notion of responsibility, everyone’s big bet was technology. Filtering, machine learning and artificial intelligence would allow impartial review, flagging and removal of blatant hate content. Our aspirations for technology are still way ahead of reality. Technology only multiplies human efforts. It does not yet replace them. Massive resources have been diverted to the development of AI and machine learning while the problems and damage from cyber hate continued.

Just as each platform’s efforts are an isolated approach to the issue, so are the definitions, terminologies and measurements applied by each of them. We rarely agree what is defined as hate.  Each faction usually insist their specific interpretation of hate is correct.

There are endless volumes of incredibly useful,  intelligent, relevant documents, studies, and civil society declarations. These are often dismissed  out of political, economic, or business expediency. Often we have seen competing priorities reflecting only the priorities of the stakeholders in the room at any one moment in time.  When looking to take credit or serving a specific agenda is the motivating factor, the result only send a limited message and may only be a limited success.

Holocaust denial will not be disappearing from Facebook, or any platform, any time soon. Facebook correctly points out that it will take time to adjust its processes to achieve any progress in banning Holocaust denial.  Hate is highly adaptive. Chasing hate terminology, including Holocaust denial,  may be an endless job. The real-world impact of reducing anti-Semitism through Facebook’s change may well be marginal. Online hate, once posted, is quickly shared. Once that happens, even if its removal on one platform cannot stop the poisonous content, links and ideas from propagating. Facebook’s commitment and efforts to address Holocaust denial is largely a victory for Facebook.  

With each incomplete effort, even when each effort may indeed represent good progress, there is the reality that time, energy, resources, and hope are left on the table. Every time.

The Holocaust happened. Denying it does not improve our understanding of it. The same is true of racism, bias and xenophobia of all kinds. Until we accept that no group is innocent of hate, or safe from being hated, only then we can begin to scrape the rust off our ideals. Banning Holocaust denial on Facebook is a start, but only a start. Only one facet of much larger questions.