While I disagree with their decision to prohibit photographs of nipples, doing so is unfortunately quite prudent lest US politicians decide to meddle.
A private citizen or company may choose not to broadcast whatever it likes, for whatever reason. This is not "censorship" except in the broadest and most meaningless possible sense.
I agree with you, but to call it "censorship" is to cede part of the argument.
The list is endless, you can just run around and shut down all non straight opinion makers and by the way Facebook is not NYT.
I support their right to express it. I also support Facebook's right to remove them from the virtual, private premises for expressing it. I also support their right to complain that Facebook deleted their account because they were expressing hate-speech. I also support our collective right to side with Facebook on this one.
I write this not because I agree with Holocaust deniers. What if the issue were a 9/11 conspiracy theorist group? A group that discusses differences in intelligence between ethnic groups?
Then I would not support their removal. I don't have any credible evidence that 9/11 truthers are rooting for mass murder on a global scale, so I believe they're harmless.
Facebook is free to shape their community in any manner they see fit. If their goal is simply to have the largest audience possible then perhaps being overly political correct serves their purposes well. I happen to believe that a community is much more interesting when distasteful views are not censored. I'd much rather give users the option to suppress groups that they do not wish to see.
I would fully support Google's right to remove any discussion they don't like from any forums where they host discussion. I think making something disappear from the search results would be a little more delicate, particularly since Google are currently in a quasi-monopoly situation, but I would, on the whole, support their right to block search results that they want to block, yes.
And Facebook has decided that it will not remove them. Issue closed. They've made their position pretty clear.
Holocaust denial is not 'an opinion': it is a blatant lie. There is no reason why spreading lies about historical facts should be less punishable then spreading lies about a companies' products. They both do damage and the cumulative damage of the first category is much more dangerous.
The first amendment is not there to allow idiots, fearmongers, demagogues and pussies to hide behind a twisted interpretation of the word 'opinion'. Neither uninformed statements that are false nor lies are opinions and neither is protected by the first amendment.
We forgive those that utter uninformed statements, 'for they know not what they do'. When they are informed of what they do and insist on repeating the statement, it becomes a lie.
The phrase "when they are informed" skips the step where they are somehow convinced of the truth of the information. Do you think that they "really know" the Holocaust happened and are actually lying, or do you think they're actually mistaken? If there's any significant chance of the latter (and if you think that Holocaust deniers are a serious problem, which I don't necessarily agree with), then figuring out what evidence would be convincing is important.
We like to believe that punishment teaches and that even criminals consider their punishments fair. Fact is: they don't consider them fair and they don't learn. Yet we keep punishing them, because locking them away makes life much nicer for the rest of us.
I think you're making broad assumptions about what we (by which I assume you mean world (or maybe just Western) civilization) want and believe which may not hold up to scrutiny. While they're often conflated, there are at least three different goals for what societies do to criminals: retribution, restitution, and punishment. Some of us think that it would be better to use the first two only, and that feeling "punished" should be only an effect of that. But that's another topic.
The irony here is that if Germans hadn't lost their freedom of expression under the Nazis, the holocaust might not have happened at the scale it did.
The Holocaust happened. It is sufficient to fully show the evidence of what happened and leave it at that. Prohibiting anyone from making claims to the contrary is no defense of the truth. Only liars need that defense.
The first two don't need to be illegal, because they don't do much damage. There is little emotional attachment, making the controversy less influential or dangerous.
The last one is trickier: the education of children is certainly impaired by withholding facts from them. Everyone is entitled to every conviction, but no one is entitled to spreading lies about contrary convictions, not even to their own children. If we could reasonably make that illegal, I'd go for it, but I don't think we could write up a law in such a way that it would work. Those are the trade-offs that have to be considered.
Well that's rather ad hoc of you. If holocaust denial causes "harm" by convincing people that the Jews are liars, wouldn't Oswald denial cause harm by convincing people the American government covered up a coup it instituted against its own president, shattering all social stability?
Wouldn't moon-landing denial do the same thing? I seem to remember Buzz Aldrin getting real angry and punching a moon-landing denier in the face for calling him a liar. Do you think Buzz had a legal case for defamation there? Wouldn't moon-landing-denial hurt sales of Buzz Aldrin's books?
Why can't you just accept the fact that we have to share the world with a bunch of cranks?
I'm not arguing in favor of actually making this behaviour illegal, as it is simply not possible to formulate a proper law covering the exact behaviour you'd want to prevent. Any attempted law would be extremely prone to abuse.
I merely wanted to argue in favor of Facebook banning what they judge to be unwanted examples of holocaust denial, without fearing the wrath of people waving the 1st amendment around. What's good for facebook isn't necessarily good for a country :).
To me, singling out Holocaust denial as the one prohibited form of crankism on Facebook smacks of exceptionalism. You can have conspiracy theories or contrary opinions about any other historical event, no matter how many people were killed—just not that one.
Notably, you can become a "fan" of Ataturk or Genghis Khan or Andrew Jackson or Christopher Columbus on Facebook, but not Hitler.