In Mr. Darcy’s telling, Facebook officials seemed taken aback by the question. John Hegeman, Facebook’s head of News Feed, stumbled through an answer about how “just being false doesn’t violate the community standards,” and how Infowars was a publisher with a “different point of view.”
Later, the social network argued that banning organizations that repeatedly peddle misinformation would be “contrary to the basic principles of free speech.” The company insisted that even if Infowars and other sites that push misinformation are not banned, they might still be penalized. Facebook has contracted with dozens of fact-checking organizations around the world; if its fact checkers determined that a specific Infowars story was false, people would be allowed to share it with their friends, but Facebook would push it so far down in everyone’s feeds that most of them would not see it.
Part of the reason Facebook defended Infowars seemed to become evident this week on Capitol Hill. That was when Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president of global policy management, showed up at a congressional hearing along with other social media executives to answer questions about whether they may be biased against conservatives. In the hearing, Ms. Bickert apologized to Diamond and Silk, two pro-Trump social media stars who had claimed they were treated unfairly by Facebook.
Then came Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments to Ms. Swisher on Wednesday about Holocaust denialism — and the question about what Facebook would or would not allow on its site became even more confusing.
Even setting aside Mr. Zuckerberg’s bizarre idea that there are good-faith Holocaust deniers who are merely misinformed about the past, his argument raised several other issues, including hate speech. Facebook’s code of conduct prohibits hate speech, which it defines as attacks on people based on “protected characteristics” like race, ethnicity, or religion. Wouldn’t Holocaust denialism fall into that category?
A Facebook spokeswoman explained that it would be possible, theoretically, to deny the Holocaust without triggering Facebook’s hate-speech clause.
That wasn’t all. On Wednesday, Facebook also rolled out a new policy on misinformation that complicated matters some more. The company said it had decided that, actually, it would remove — and not just downrank — certain false posts if it determined that they might lead to imminent violence.
