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You are right that there is harm done in all cases, but the amount of harm differs and even breaking the law comes in degrees (at the discretion of the cop or j

You are right that there is harm done in all cases, but the amount of harm differs and even breaking the law comes in degrees (at the discretion of the cop or judge). 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 :).

philwelch 18y ago
And if Facebook was banning them for being cranks, that would be one thing. I usually downvote crank comments on Hacker News because we're a specialized community that values rational thought. 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.