The decision, which Facebook announced Monday, reverses years of refusal to remove Holocaust-related conspiracy theories from the platform.
Mark Zuckerberg has long made clear that because he sees Facebook as a platform that protects free speech, Holocaust denials and other conspiracy theories would not be banned on the platform.
"The approach that we've taken to false news is not to say: You can't say something wrong on the internet," he said in a 2018 interview with Recode's Kara Swisher.
In a Facebook post soon after the announcement, Zuckerberg admitted to changing his mind. "I've struggled with the tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused by minimizing or denying the horror of the Holocaust. My own thinking has evolved as I've seen data showing an increase in anti-Semitic violence, as have our wider policies on hate speech," he wrote.
The announcement comes after weeks of employee pushback against the company's hate speech and monitoring policies, culminating in the much-discussed resignation of Facebook engineer Ashok Chandwaney and the launch of "The Real Facebook Oversight Board," a group of prominent Facebook critics.
Climate TRACE's data show emissions at the facility-level.Image: Climate TRACE