SoylentNews

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Backtracks on Comments About Holocaust Deniers

posted by FatPhil on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:45PM   
from the I-THINK-THAT-PROBABLY-CLARIFIES-THINGS dept.

realDonaldTrump did, or maybe didn't, write:

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg backtracks on comments about Holocaust deniers

Facebook may be locked in a battle against fake news, and now CEO Mark Zuckerberg is backtracking on claims that the social network won't ban Holocaust deniers.

Zuckerberg gave the explanation to Recode after the site aired audio of the Facebook founder claiming "abhorrent" content, the New York Post reported, had a right to spread across his massive social media network.

"I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn't intend to defend the intent of people who deny that," Zuckerberg told the website later. "Of course if a post crossed a line into advocating for violence or hate against a particular group, it would be removed. … These issues are very challenging but I believe that often the best way to fight offensive bad speech is with good speech."

Earlier, Zuckerberg had spoken differently.

"I don't think that we should be in the business of having people at Facebook who are deciding what is true and what isn't," he said, during an episode of the Recode Decode podcast on Wednesday.

Ed's note: And if there's one thing we can all agree on regarding limitations to freedom of speech online, it's that we'll never all agree regarding limitations to freedom of speech online!

---

Original Submission

• Re:Guilty (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 26 2018, @12:00PM

  by khallow (3766) on Thursday July 26 2018, @12:00PM (#713026) Journal

  What's usually not taught in school is how the USA was happily doing business with and thereby economically and materially supporting Nazi Germany quite some time into the war.

  It would be educational to apply a date to that and compare the support for Nazi Germany to the support for the UK.

  The OSS didn't have the resources the CIA has these days, but you can be fairly certain that the ethnic cleansings, deportations and death camps didn't go unnoticed from US leadership. Not part of the curriculum either: that the USA entered the war in Europe only after it became apparent the Red Army would be winning and therefore there was the very real threat of communism taking all the spoils of war.

  Assertions made without evidence or relevance for that matter. And one of the three is not like the others. Ethnic cleansings and deportations were well known from before the war started while death camps were covert. That's part of the reason the USSR survived the Second World War in the first place because Hitler turned out to be worse than Stalin and Russians knew that.
  
  As to the death camps, why does it matter when they were known about? I imagine there's also a huge difference between some intelligence report that might be wrong and having your people actually in the compound taking pictures and interviewing the inmates.
  
  Finally, the US was involved in the fight in Europe from early on, including massive support for every ally in the region and fighting in North Africa.

  Not talked about either: how the US recruited Nazi/SS officers into secret service positions while an occupying force after the war. Because Nazis are still better than communists, rait? And I dare you to publically mention the US-initiated Gladio/stay behind guerilla cells all over Europe, recruited preferentially from old and new Nazis - still better than communists, remember - you'll be called a conspiracy theorist. But I digress.

  What's supposed to be wrong with that? There has never been only one group of bad people in the world and the Communists were already set to take over the rest of Europe. Making allies of a defeated enemy is far from a new thing.
  
  Let us note a more modern example that went the other way. The US, after toppling the Saddam Hussein government, banned former Baathists from the new government. Many of those then ended up providing support for various enemies of the US in the region, particularly ISIS.

  US intervention in WW2 in Europe was never about the death camps or liberation from the Nazis. It was about what was best for the USA's long term economic interests. So yes, your school children should probably learn about the holocaust.

  And yet the death camps were ended and you were liberated from both the Nazis and the Communists. So maybe motive isn't as important as you make it out to be.

  Parent