Creating Reality: Facebook complies with Holocaust denial

Is Facebook’s newly proclaimed indifference to truth a betrayal of those murdered by the Nazis? Facebook hosts an uncountable number of Holocaust deniers. For many, it is difficult to believe that Holocaust rejection is a real thing, but it is. Below is a link to Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, world-renowned scholar on the history of antisemitism, giving a short Ted Talk on “Behind the Lies of Holocaust denial.”
What does it mean to be “even-handed” to the Holocaust? Is Facebook trying to be like Switzerland? Does neutrality to Nazism make one complicit with it? Disinterest does nothing for the victims of those lies.
Does indifference to the Holocaust make one a retroactive participant in the genocide of European Jewry? Is it okay to stand by when others say that the slaughtered were never slaughtered? Is it a consequence of this lie that those destroyed had never lived? Only the living is executed, or so I thought. Imagine saying that the exterminated Jews had never lived. Facebook is now in compliance with people gaslighting the Holocaust.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recently reported that 46 percent of the world harbors antisemitic feelings toward Jews. It’s a spectrum. Some are worse than others, but most share the belief that Jews are bad for the world. It’s not a new thought, it’s been the norm since two world civilizations appropriated Jewish stories for themselves, kicking Jewry out of its own story. Justifying the appropriation caused burying Judaism and thus Jews by building on top of them.
“Never Again” requires knowing that it took place, that it is the truth. Facebook’s embrace of “alternative fact” speakers’ denying the Holocaust facilitates the murderous drives of Nazis. There is no Switzerland on this map. There is no neutrality. You are defending it happened, the truth, or you are facilitating that no one was destroyed. Facebook’s neutrality provides aid, giving cover to the lie Nazis and company did not murder six million Jews.
I am reminded of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ media philosophy for Nazism’s press. The truth was what Hitler said it was regardless of facts, Hitler über Alles. Tell the lie over and over and people will turn the fiction into a fact. We see how this works now on Facebook. Welcome to a world where reality has little footing in empiricism. For example, there’s more: today many American leaders say climate change is a hoax. Facebook isn’t concerned, allowing for conspiracies to bury science, such as the need for polio vaccines.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian-journalist Anne Applebaum recently wrote in The Atlantic that anti-science conspiracy theories are fueling Europe and the United States’ transition to autocracies. It’s as if “Rasputin” is in on running things. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/trump-populist-conspiracism-autocracy-rfk-jr/681088/Is this indifference to truth helping create a context for the preconditions to come at us again?
I wonder if Mr. Zuckerberg truly understands the implications of this. For example, what if a post on Facebook denies the Nazis directed Lodz Ghetto Director Chaim Rumkowski to turnover 20,000 children under the age of 10 to be gassed to death with conspiracies about Jews. What if this denier posts it was a Jewish conspiracy to murder those children. The post goes viral. The Truth is now contested. Does this play into the hand of the antisemite? Nevertheless, truth is stubborn. It is not a flag, we hope.
Rumkowski’s speech asking for the ghettos’ children will horrify you. Below is a link to a reenactment of it, “Give me your children,” on September 4,1942, in which he demanded 20,000 children for Hitler. It is cold, chilling that Facebook provides space without account for those denying that Nazism murdered these 20,000 children, implying they had never lived.
Fortunately, the world annually observes International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th, this Monday. We have Holocaust museums, such as Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, The United States Holocaust Museum in DC, in part inspired by the prevalence of Holocaust denial, and of course, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and many others. There are opportunities to educate. We also have Germany that owns what it did.
I was recently in Berlin where Jew-hatred is explicitly fought. I’ve never experienced anything like it. There are problems of which I’ve recently written about, but it’s still incredible how Germany fights antisemitism with Jewish museums, symbols, signage and more.
Remembering the destroyed lives and how those bodies were exterminated is important. “Never Again” matters even as genocide keeps happening around the world. No other country has owned genocide like Germany, nor has any other genocide been documented like Nazi Germany. Its former Austrian Nazi partner still denies its complicity in claiming to be victims of Nazis. It is incomprehensible. Another example is the United States who doesn’t own the genocide committed against the enslaved Africans and their enslaved descendants. Nor has it owned its genocidal butchering of Native American nations. Facebook is now indifferent toward those who deny these truths, too.
What does it mean to be neutral toward those preaching “Always Again?” What does indifference to it mean when you have the privilege to upend the lies? Is it to make oneself complicit with those denying the Holocaust? For an accessible introduction to the history of antisemitism read James Carroll’s “Constantine’s Sword”: https://www.jamescarroll.net/constantinessword/book
I wonder if Mr. Zuckerberg dreamed he would help facilitate those creating the conditions for a new genocide, such as the Holocaust. I ask because from what he presents, he is seemingly living a dream without regard for the truth.