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Why did it Take Mark Zuckerberg a Decade to Realize Holocaust Denial is bad?

A terrible business model, shareholder pressure, and a short supply of the truth.

Anthony Andranik Moumjian
4 min readOct 14, 2020
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook post on the update to hate speech. October 12th, 2020.

On October 12th, 2020, Mark Zuckerberg let the world know that it was updating its hate speech policy.

As the third emoji suggests, a lot of people found this change laughably — for most, Holocaust denial is a no-brainer.

In fact, the thing that it suggests Zuckerberg “struggled with” is not the “tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused by minimizing or denying the horror of the Holocaust”. It seems to suggest a tension between what his shareholders might react to and what they would find acceptable.

Nowhere in this update is Zuckerberg clearly stating all genocides. Zuckerberg is strictly talking about the Holocaust. The Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Holocaust took place between 1914 and 1923, which even Raphael Lemkin would later claim was the impetus for the structure of the Third Reich and the Holocaust.

Why is data necessary to show that genocide/Holocaust denial is bad?

This is a sober question. What’s most sobering is the realization that Zuckerberg directly gains from…

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Anthony Andranik Moumjian
Anthony Andranik Moumjian

Written by Anthony Andranik Moumjian

Los Angeles. Long-time runner. Top writer on Quora, 100M+ total content views. New to Medium. Inquiries: Moumj@berkeley.edu

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