A post denying the Holocaust has been removed by social media platform X after criticism from the Auschwitz Museum.
According to the BBC, X had initially said the post did not break its rules.
The offending post, which reportedly used anti-Semitic tropes, said in a reply to one from the museum about a three-year-old Jewish girl murdered in the concentration camp’s gas chambers that the infant’s death was a ‘fairy tale’.
While X’s policies state that Holocaust denial is prohibited, the BBC says that, according to a post by the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, it had reported the offensive reply but received a response saying that after viewing the ‘available information’ the platform had decided no rules had been broken.
X said the initial response to the museum’s complaint was down to a mistake during the first review, but the post was removed in a second review.
At least 1.1 million people were murdered in the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. Almost one million were Jews. The museum notes more than 200 000 were children and young people.
They were gassed, starved, worked to death and killed in medical experiments.
The BBC reports that Elon Musk, who describes himself as a free speech absolutist, denies there has been a rise in hateful posts since he took over Twitter, as it was then called. In December, he tweeted that hate speech was down by a third.
X concedes that its team responsible for policing hate speech on the platform is smaller than before Musk took over, but argues its new approach – which it says centres on a zero tolerance for illegal material, and de-amplifying and removing ads from lawful but offensive material – is more effective.
Disputing this, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue says in a report that there has been ‘a major and sustained spike in anti-Semitic posts on Twitter’ since the company’s takeover by Musk in October.
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has also suggested that Twitter ‘fails to act on 99%’ of hateful messages from accounts with Twitter Blue, the platform’s subscription service.
[Photo: A group of children assembled for deportation to Chelmno. During the roundup known as the “Gehsperre” Aktion, the elderly, infirm, and children were rounded up for deportation. Lodz, Poland, September 5-12, 1942.]