Attorney Brian Cuban, brother to Dallas Mavericks owner and entrepreneur Mark Cuban, has published an open letter to Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg demanding the removal of Holocaust Denial groups from the site.
Brian has been asking Facebook to remove the groups since last year without success. He makes legitimate points, and even discounting the strong emotional reaction many of us have to Holocaust Denial, Cuban’s argument appears rational and without fault. Facebook will likely need to post a public response and even change its position.
The groups in question include “Holocaust: A Series of Lies,” and “Holocaust is a Holohoax”, but Facebook’s current position is that they will only block access to the groups from countries (such as Germany) where Holocaust Denial is illegal - they will not be removed in the US.
Open Letter
In his open letter, Cuban writes:
While I have made it clear that I would like to see these groups removed, I have done a poor job in articulating why. I attempted to take a short-sighted, back door “lawyer’s approach” with Facebook by alleging that Holocaust Denial was illegal in other countries and, therefore, a violation of Facebook TOS. While at the time, these were legitimate issues, I should have focused on the real issue. The issue of the proliferation of Facebook groups that promote hatred of religious and ethnics groups and the hate speech those groups perpetrate. While you may have your doubts, I submit that this includes those who promote the fringe revisionist theory of Holocaust Denial.
The Holocaust Denial movement is nothing more than a pretext to allow the preaching of hatred against Jews and to recruit other like minded individuals to do the same. Allowing these groups to flourish on Facebook under the guise of “open discussion” does nothing more than help spread their message of hate. Is this the kind of open discussion that Facebook wants to encourage? Is this really where they want to draw their line?
Cuban also posted Facebook’s stance on the situation, as expressed by Facebook representative Barry Schnitt in a CNN interview:
“It’s a difficult decision to make. We have a lot of internal debate and we bring in experts to talk about it,” Schnitt said. “Just being offensive or objectionable doesn’t get it taken off Facebook. We want it [the site] to be a place where people can discuss all kinds of ideas, including controversial ones.”
Schnitt further explained Facebook’s position to the blog Technically Incorrect:
“One thing to consider that someone actually mentioned in the thread was the idea that there may be a benefit to having these ideas discussed in the open. Would we rather Holocaust denial was discussed behind closed doors or quietly propagated by anonymous sources? Or would we rather it was discussed in the open on Facebook where people’s real names and their photo is associated with it for their friends, peers, and colleagues to see?”
Inconsistent Policy
We recently covered Facebook’s removal of a KKK group, which was fully justified by the Facebook Terms of Service: it forbids posting “hateful” content. It seems, then, that Facebook is being inconsistent: Holocaust Denial is generally considered to be antisemitic, and thus hateful. Even if you were to disagree that Holocaust Denial itself is hateful, you can visit those pages and find that they include a number of racist, antisemitic terms: the presence of racist words should surely make the decision a clear cut one.
It seems highly unlikely that Facebook will be able to maintain its position given that the groups appear to violate its own Terms: we may see a change of policy this week.
