Zuckerberg Tries to Clarify Remarks About Holocaust Deniers After Outcry

Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, said in an interview published Wednesday that he would not automatically remove denials that the Holocaust took place from the site, a remark that caused an uproar online.

Zuckerberg’s comments were made during an interview with tech journalist Kara Swisher that was published on the site Recode. Hours later, Zuckerberg tried to clarify his comments in an email to Recode.

In the interview, Zuckerberg had been discussing what content Facebook would remove from the site, and noted that in countries like Myanmar and Sri Lanka, the dissemination of hate speech can have immediate and dire consequences. Moments earlier, he had also defended his company’s decision to allow content from the conspiracy site Infowars to be distributed on Facebook.

“The principles that we have on what we remove from the service are: If it’s going to result in real harm, real physical harm, or if you’re attacking individuals, then that content shouldn’t be on the platform,” he said.

“There’s a lot of categories of that that we can get into, but then there’s broad debate.”

Swisher, who will become an Opinion contributor with The New York Times later this summer, challenged Zuckerberg.

“'Sandy Hook didn’t happen’ is not a debate,” she said, referring to the Connecticut school massacre in 2012, which Infowars has spread conspiracy theories about. “It is false. You can’t just take that down?”

Zuckerberg countered that the context of the remark mattered.

“I also think that going to someone who is a victim of Sandy Hook and telling them, ‘Hey, no, you’re a liar’ — that is harassment, and we actually will take that down,” he said.

That’s when Zuckerberg brought up the Holocaust.

Swisher interrupted him: “In the case of the Holocaust deniers, they might be, but go ahead.”

Zuckerberg’s response was somewhat muddled.

“It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent,” he said, adding that he also gets things wrong when he speaks publicly, and other public figures do as well.

“I just don’t think that it is the right thing to say, ‘We’re going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times,'” he said.

Instead, Facebook would allow the content to exist on its site, but would move it down in the News Feed so that fewer users see it, he said.

In his follow-up statement, the Facebook chief executive tried to clarify his remarks.

“There’s one thing I want to clear up. I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn’t intend to defend the intent of people who deny that,” he wrote in the email.

“If something is spreading and is rated false by fact checkers, it would lose the vast majority of its distribution,” he wrote, adding that any post “advocating for violence or hate against a particular group” would be removed.

“These issues are very challenging,” he added, “but I believe that often the best way to fight offensive bad speech is with good speech.”

But the interview had already set off a reaction from online commenters and drew widespread news coverage.

Benjy Sarlin of NBC News seemed baffled by Zuckerberg’s choice of words.

“So apparently Mark Zuckerberg is under the impression there’s some good-faith debate going on over whether the Holocaust happened?” Sarlin wrote on Twitter.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement that Holocaust denial is “a willful, deliberate and long-standing deception tactic by anti-Semites.”

“Facebook has a moral and ethical obligation not to allow its dissemination,” he wrote.