CNN News:脸谱网禁止否认犹太人大屠杀的内容
CARL AZUZ, cnn 10 ANCHOR: Social media company and the information they allow people to share. That's our first topic today on cnn 10. I'm Carl Azuz. Earlier this week, Facebook said any content, posts or articles that deny the Holocaust would no longer be allowed on its platform.
Under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany murdered 6 million Jewish people and millions of others during World War II. The Holocaust is an infamous example of genocide, the intentional destruction of a religious or ethnic group. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, said in 2018 that though he finds it deeply offensive for people to deny the Holocaust, he didn't think Facebook should remove content that does that.
He said there are things that different people get wrong. But on Monday, Facebook told the Bloomberg financial and media company that it would ban Holocaust denial on its platform. It said it was reversing its policy because there's been a worldwide increase in anti-Semitism, discrimination against Jews, and because there's a quote "alarming level of ignorance" about the Holocaust especially among young people.
The company's new rule does not apply to other genocides though, like the Rwandan genocide or the Armenian genocide which the nation of Turkey denies. And Bloomberg says Facebook did not explain why it would still allow the other content. Zuckerberg admits he struggled with the tension between standing for free speech and the harm caused by minimizing or denying the Holocaust, but he thinks his company has found the right balance.
But that's a challenge that's not only faced by Facebook. People often get their news from social media. There are more than 2 billion Facebook users every month. There are 2 billion who use YouTube. More than 1 billion who use Instagram. 330 million who use Twitter. And all of these sites have been criticized over the information they choose to allow.
In the political world, American Democrats have said Twitter and Facebook haven't done enough to stop misinformation or fake news that spreads online. American Republicans have said the companies unfairly censor conservative speech online. This is according to the Forbes business media company. So social media organizations are often criticized for an uneven approach whenever they work to filter what's posted by hundreds of millions of users.