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Report: Holocaust Denying Facebook Groups Highlight Facebook’s Search Algorithm

[additional-authors]
July 20, 2018
Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been in hot water over his recent comments about Holocaust deniers on Facebook. Making matters worse for him is a new report showing that Holocaust denying groups are at the top of Facebook’s search algorithm.

Business Insider reports that if a user searches the word “Holocaust,” the first pages and groups that appear are Holocaust denying groups and pages, such as The Open Holocaust Debate and Holocaust Revisionism. The latter group claims that Adolf Hitler was “a Zionist puppet.”

A spokesperson for Facebook told Business Insider that such results were due to user preferences, however the Business Insider report notes that four different people had Holocaust denying groups and pages show up when they searched “Holocaust.”

In a July 18 interview with Recode, Zuckerberg said that while he finds Holocaust denying content on Facebook to be abhorrent, it shouldn’t be taken down from the platform because “at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.”

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