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Barrister Nicholas Bender, who is representing Jewish community groups, is now questioning Benjamin Good about a Holocaust denial post on Instagram which stayed on the site for four years. Bender says that in. . .
Barrister Nicholas Bender, who is representing Jewish community groups, is now questioning Benjamin Good about a Holocaust denial post on Instagram which stayed on the site for four years. Bender says that in September 2020, a meme was posted on Instagram of Squidward – a cartoon character from the television series SpongeBob SquarePants. The post included a speech bubble that said, “Fun Facts About The Holocaust,” which had “false and distorted claims about the Holocaust”, according to Meta’s Oversight Board which has the job of reviewing whether content should be removed or retained. Bender says the post questioned the number of victims of the Holocaust, “suggesting it is not possible that six million Jewish people could have been murdered based on supposed population numbers the user quotes for before and after the Second World War”. “The post also questions the existence of crematoria at Auschwitz by claiming the chimneys were built after the war, and that world leaders at the time did not acknowledge the Holocaust in their memoirs,” says the board’s report which Bender is quoting from. Bender says that in October 2020, the month after the Holocaust denial post, Meta changed its hate speech community standard to explicitly prohibit Holocaust denial. Despite this, that post remained on Instagram until January 2024: despite the policy changes, six complaints and two “human reviewers” assessing the post.