Holocaust denial groups on Facebook have spurred some vicious debate lately, especially in light of the US Holocaust Museum shooting last week, and I can’t help but jump in. After reading Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch article and the heated comments readers left below, I was both infuriated and conflicted. Should Facebook, an open forum for discussion and connectivity, intervene and selectively sensor the content its members create? I’ve made up my mind – YES.
The two most critical points to me, and I thank Arrington for drilling these in, are 1) legitimizing nonsense and 2) connecting dangerous minds. Letting people express rubbish and hate on Facebook, beside the well-respected Facebook logo, adds a concerning element of credibility to what they are saying. Secondly, the social networking capabilities facilitate the connecting of individual haters previously isolated, and this leads them to strengthen their individual views and have greater means for acting on them (ie. it’s bad news). While I strongly agree with a Facebook employee’s assertion that ‘You do not combat ignorance by trying to cover up that ignorance exists,’ I think there are many places for these views to be expressed and debated, and Facebook just should not be one of them.
But why are Jews so special, and how can they possibly draw the line? These two objections to censorship made me want to scream. First of all, this is not just for Jewish folks; this is essentially just the case study being used for a bigger decision. So what about gays, blacks, disabled people, or even gingers? Just because a line is very hard to draw does not mean that the pen should be put down. It’s against Facebook policy to threaten violence, but I think wishing groups of people dead is worthy of censorship as well. ‘Die Jews die’ and ‘woo kil the jews’ is not productive discussion… I wouldn’t tolerate any group of people being the subject of those statements.
Individual cases aside, the bigger issue of censorship in social media is going to remain important for quite some time. How do you feel about it? If you were Facebook, how would you police the groups?
StartupCafe 
I think gingers *might* be taking it too far. What next, blondes? No more blonde or ginger jokes? There are very few people in the world who would take jokes on these aspects as seriously as racial slurs or comments on disabilities – drawing sensible lines as to how far political correctness goes is just as important as political correctness in the first place.
I’m currently thinking about this issue for a new social networking site I’m working on (more info soon!).
It’s incredibly difficult, but I’ve come to a similar position as Jessica. Private companies have no obligation to allow users to spread hate messages (and especially messages promoting violence).
It is one thing to promote a viewpoint, i.e. “I don’t support civil partnerships”, or “I support Ahmadinejad”. It is totally another to suggest that violence should be used against groups of people.
It is difficult to draw a line that will clearly separate free speech from hate speech, but that won’t stop me from trying. I would rather debate where that line should be drawn than allow obvious hatred to be promoted on my social networking site.
I disagree. Facebook is one of the leading public forums on the internet for communication and discussion of any sort, it one of the Internet’s main Town Sqaures. This means it’s not fair to compare facebook to the likes of Dominos when it comes to corporate responsibility and branding. Dominos simply sell food and it’s good that they’ve chosen to avoid accidentally implying that they might support such questionable points of views. However facebook provide a means of discussing and airing opinions of any sort and as such censorship is a much more delicate issue.
Anybody who is familiar with facebook realises that most of the content it contains is generated by its userbase, not facebook, so to imply that facebook endorses hatespeech etc. is also to imply that it endorses underage drinking, use of illegal drugs, abusive language and threats, or videos of cats, beanie babies and WOW guilds. I don’t believe anybody associates the facebook brand strongly with any of these, they percieve it as the open platform that it is.
For facebook to remove users and their discussions from their site, because they don’t like their content wont stop those opinions from being held, or from the discussions from happening elsewhere. For precedence, take Conservapedia as an example. It’s an immitation of wikipedia with a Pro-American Right-wing Christian-Fundamentalist spin with a much more authoritarian approach to maintaining its content (i.e. if you disagree, tough). These people have effectively removed themselves from the discussion on wikipedia itself because they felt their views weren’t being listened to and that they’re worldview was being systematically oppressed.
As it stands with facebook, the people who are promoting their questionable opinions are doing so under their own name (facebook has strong identity for users compared to the rest of the internet) and they have to compete with the rest of the community disagreeing with them. Throw them out of facebook and they’ll no doubt start their own hatebook, with nobody to cause them to doubt themselves, and probably for the facebook community to not even be aware that they exist at all. Yes, these powerful social tools can be used to strengthen the opinions of these people by letting them communicate with each other, but they also provide new opportunities for dissenting opinions to reach them.
A few weeks ago, the fact that 40% of Britain’s voting populace believe whites are disadvantaged compared to non-whites (according to a YouGov European Election exit poll) and that the BNP could acquire a seat in the European Parliament shocked many of the white, middle-class privileged folk I’m friends with, but I believe this is because we’d let ourselves pretend such objectionable opinions and voting preferences weren’t as prevalent as they are, because we don’t communicate with anybody that holds them. I find it deeply ironic that Arrington used the head-in-the-sand image for his post because by seeking to drive such people out of his walled garden, he’ll be doing just that, pretending the problem doesn’t actually exist at all.
There’s one more, very important aspect of the whole story – the law.
It’s illegal in many European countries (such as Poland, Austria, Germany and others) to deny Holocaust, in many cases under the penalty of imprisonment. EU law (E-commerce directive) requires Internet Service Providers (such as Facebook) to act against illegal content,if they’re aware of its existence (that doesn’t relate only to IP infringement).
However, Facebook is based in the USA and as such should be governed by the USA legislation, it still can be caught by European law by targeting its services to European citizens.
That’s why they should immediately act against any such groups.
The common approach taken by Google et al is to implement those restrictions only for the regionalised version of the site iirc. So facebook might want to deny access to such groups for users which are registered as being within such regions, but removing the groups/discussion entirely to satisfy those laws opens the door to having to delete tibetan protest groups to pacify the Chinese or anti-Ahmadinejad groups to satisy Iran. That would make facebook a much poorer place to be imo.
I’ve now twice gone to bed and woken up thinking about this, so thanks for all the comments so far. I’m glad you’re making me think harder…
I’m not trying to imply that Facebook endorses the views expressed within it. I’m saying that the expression of these views on Facebook gives them more legitimacy than they’d otherwise have.
What if there were groups titled ‘Burn the Gays’ or ‘Rape is Fun’? I think simply the existence of a Facebook group to join, with those names, makes it suddenly more ‘ok’ to hold those beliefs. Does it also shed light on and enable talk back? Sure. But it would be a stretch to claim that open intellectual discussion is going on in these groups. Instead, it becomes an arms race to see which side can build up the most followers (ie. ‘Rape is Fun’ or ‘Against Rape is Fun’), with the dangerous groups in question building momentum in the process. [No, these are not real groups to my knowledge, but used for illustration purposes.]
I’m not asking Facebook to censor THOUGHT. ‘die jews die,’ in my opinion, does not constitute thought. If this were really an academic or intellectual debate, then I would not object. In the same vein, ‘questionable opinions’ are fine. It’s the dangerously hateful talk that concerns me.
Mark, I don’t think we’re far from agreeing actually. I feel that your comment ‘Yes, these powerful social tools can be used to strengthen the opinions of these people by letting them communicate with each other, but they also provide new opportunities for dissenting opinions to reach them.’ sums it up extremely well. But I think the harm done far outweighs the potential benefits.
I did a quick search for both and came up with the following groups:
Gays Shall Burn: http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?sid=0&gid=87303939820&ref=search
I rape nuns 4 fun: http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?sid=0&gid=6560641123&ref=search
Neither is racking up millions of members, and the latter seems to be mostly in poor taste despite its deplorable sentiment (not entirely sure about some of the other results that search picked up though…), but it shows that even these hypothetical surely-nobody-would-make-such-a-groups exist, and I’m not sure if its clear that either of them should be outright banned.
Personally, I’m not capable of determining the difference between a persons opinions and what they genuinely state their opinions are.
But I suspect the issue at hand isn’t people stating their beliefs, but being given a platform to advocate for them and to potentially bring others to their side. Which brings us back to the two-edged sword of freedom. For me, the potential harm done is that otherwise neutral people find themselves conned into believing distateful things they wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to. The potential benefit is that these ideas are instead shown publicly for the farces they are their strength as memes are undermined, persuading current believers that they’re wrong. I put a far greater value on reducing the number of people holding these ideas than I negatively value the impact of letting it spread at a comparable rate, so the risk profile looks like it’s worth it to me.
For a convenient comparison, it looks like Germany is about censor the internet: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/The_Dawning_of_Internet_Censorship_in_Germany . The distasteful content used to justify this is Child Pornography, but it sets a precedent and it’s only a matter of time before less questionable content is added to it. Facebook might not be a country, but it has a citizenry in the millions, and despite the farcical vote they offered users the other month, there’s no democratic representation. So far they only censor nudity, which is such a broadly accepted taboo, and is only scoped to images, it doesn’t need much questioning. Give them the precedent to censor words, opinions and ideas though, and you can only expect them to work in their shareholders best interests, and I don’t think I want a bunch of old, privileged, wealthy white guys deciding what I can link to or discuss. It’s bad enough that they wont let me rickroll anymore.
Wow, I’m surprised by your research results, thanks for highlighting those!
The nuns one appears to be someone’s idea of entertainment, so as much as I find it distasteful, I would not vote to ban it. The gays group holds the belief that gays will burn in hell, as opposed to burning them in real life. I’d say this is religious debate, and is not threatening, so I’d let it stay.
A similar group “BURN ALL GAYS!!!” http://tinyurl.com/burnallgays is rather concerning in my opinion. In the last two days, comments include:
“take them and shoot them and then burn then and shoot them again!”
“someone started the group kenyan somali gay boys, we track those sons of bitches down and burn em, i have the petrol and tyres, someone bring the light…”
I am trying to put my gut feeling into words, or into a suggested censorship guideline, but this is alarming to me. Advocating for a group of people to be killed is still crossing the line in my mind. I would not expect Facebook to be democratic, nor would I want it to be actually. I trust the user-base less than I trust those in charge.
Completely agree with your explanation of potential harm and potential benefit, Mark, but I don’t foresee many of the true haters being enlightened or swayed by this platform. I still see the damage of free speech on Facebook as being the sharper, more impactful side of the double-edge sword.
Fair enough. My personal fear is that it’s very easy to set a precedence with well meaning censorship which could end up being abused: who watches the watchmen etc. You can sort of see this already with facebook’s ban on nudity. This allows them to keep the site clean of embarassing photos, porn and worse, but it also means the nursing mothers groups have trouble uploading photos.
I noticed yesterday that [danah boyd](http://www.danah.org/) has compared the shifting of white, upwardly mobile teens to facebook from myspace as a digital equivalent of the [white flight](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight) of last century. Censoring the content on facebook strikes me as a similar approach to the sanitation of white suburbs in america: the “safe” houses, gardens, streets and neighbours which the white middle class deemed appropriate influences for their children, and ultimately themselves. But maybe such processes are inevitable, and I guess some may even argue desirable?
damn, please ignore the markdown formatting, forgot this wasn’t my tumblr 😀
It’s not a problem of facebook, myspace or whatever else social portal. It’s a problem of cultural standards and democracy.
The problem of facebook (and others) is its cross-border, cross-cultural operability. What’s acceptably in (for instance) the United States may be distasteful in other countries. For instance, Holocaust denial is not a crime in the USA (correct me if I’m wrong) but is a crime in many European countries.
Giving other example, your picture with a beer on facebook is completely fine form me, but for radical Iranian Muslims might be insulting.
Finding one standards for such a varied community is impossible.
Maybe that community can solve it itself? Maybe voting system would bring some filtering capabilities? On the other hand, what about minorities?