Holocaust as a test word

Facebook introduces a ban on publications that deny or distort the Holocaust. This statement of the leadership of the largest social network is good news for us.

It is bad that the reason for this ban, on explaining the company Facebook itself, was the growth of anti -Semitic sentiments in the world and their distribution through social networks, as well as the lack of knowledge about the Holocaust in the main mass of users. According to surveys conducted by the company, every fourth American aged 18 to 39 years considers the Holocaust fiction or exaggeration.

For several years, Facebook , it turns out, studied in contact with the largest Jewish organizations, how national hatred and anti -Semitism are manifested and expressed in social networks, and based on their materials and recommendations came to the need to take urgent measures.

One of these organizations is the World Jewish Congress, where I have the honor of being vice president and member of the managing committee, and the Russian Jewish Congress is included in the century as an associative member. So it can be assumed that Facebook is also affected by the data of our research. Many years of rivers, together with the Center for Owl, has been conducting daily monitoring of anti-Semitic accidents in Russia , and the Levada Center by order of the river regularly prepares large-scale sociological studies of the level of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in our country. In addition, every two years we have been holding the Moscow International Conference “Protect the Future” . Our first conference in 2016 was devoted to counteracting anti -Semitism. In the second, we expanded the frame and devoted it to anti -Semitism, xenophobia and racism. When planning the next, we set the struggle with xenophobia in the first place. Now that the epidemiological situation will allow us, we will hold the III Moscow International Conference on Combating Xenophobia, Anti -Semitism and Racism.

Both we and other experts for several years have been fixing what Facebook has now reacted to: anti -Semitism in the world is growing. And what else is noted by researchers and fix in the final documents of the Moscow International Conference: the main channel for the formation and distribution of anti -Semitic sentiments, myths, stereotypes and incitement materials are social networks. This is a channel of high efficiency, almost limitless availability and almost absolutely uncontrolled.

I think that these two factors - the growth of anti -Semitism in the world and the role in this social networks - moved Facebook to the step taken.

Jews are by no means the only and far from the first group that Facebook undertook to defend with its content filter. The largest social network has long been accused of censorship (especially a grave sin in the Internet community), hypocrisy and puritanism, intrusive control over content, which is perceived as interference in the private life of users and limiting their freedom of statement.

The fact that after many prohibitions it introduced, Facebook adds one more that will clearly cause a new wave of accusations of bias, says that experts and Facebook analysts recognized the situation in the world with anti -Semitism so dangerous that it is no longer possible not to intervene. It is this situation that should bother us all.

It’s good that this ban is finally introduced. Because if he works and turns out to be effective (by the way, I am not quite sure - there are too many difficulties not only in developing criteria and algorithms, but also in their use), this will really reduce the spread of anti -Semitism through the most viral source.

Facebook is working realists. They did not set themselves the goal of cleaning anti -Semitism from content - this is a too complicated task. They determined the link that can be considered key (or characteristic) and which they can pull out or seem feasible.

Why is this link the Holocaust? Because it is too obvious evil, too terrible tragedy, a strictly established historical fact. The most understandable and simple for perception is despite the horror contained in it and even thanks to him.

Therefore, his denial, his understatement, his justification, mockery of him is a clear, obvious, to suppress anti -Semitism.

This can only be welcomed. The fact is that the universal and most common ground for anti -Semitism is ignorance, existing or planted stereotypes. The more people will know about the Holocaust - truth, not myths! - The less they will be subject to anti -Semitism.

It is no accident that one of the incentive motives for the introduction of the ban, according to the Facebook administration itself, was the already mentioned study, according to which a quarter of adult young Americans did not know about the Holocaust or have distorted information about it. First, let them find out and be spared from misinformation at least about the Holocaust - then this will inevitably affect the susceptibility of anti -Semitism as a whole.

In Russia (and in general, the former USSR), the information of the population, especially youth, is no better about the most terrible tragedy of the twentieth century. Only three dozen years ago they began to talk about this. Under Soviet power, the Holocaust was a forbidden topic. It was forbidden to even erect monuments to the dead (even with their own money), and when it was possible to establish a monument at the site of a mass execution, it was forbidden to indicate to whom. In my native place, where many members of my mother’s family were shot, they hardly erected a monument already in the 1960s , but it was not allowed to crown the six-pointed star, as is customary on Jewish tombstones, did not allow them to write that these were killed Jews: only “Soviet citizens” and a five-pointed star, like everyone else.

The first thing I did when I came to the rivers was the search for places of executions, installing memorials on them, restoring the existing ones. We continue to “return dignity” to this project - we opened dozens of memorials, and even more. Most of these places are no longer or there are almost no Jews. We put the monuments to the fallen, so that the living ones know.

A few years ago, rivers participated in the creation of the film "Holocaust - Glue for Wallpaper?" . Two twin girls from the Russian hinterland, who answered the quiz question “What is the Holocaust?”, Director Mumin Shakirov drove to Auschwitz-and removed the shock that they experienced there. Who knows - there will be no anti -Semite. But the truth must be known.

Let's hope that the new censorship ban on Facebook is a good matter not only in the fight against the denial of the Holocaust and not only in the fight against anti -Semitism. This is a serious step in the fight against xenophobia.