Quora Moderation and Holocaust Deniers

Nearly everyone who has ever written anything on the question-and-answer site Quora harbors a seething disdain for Quora Moderation, which is notorious for collapsing and deleting answers and comments that are completely in line with Quora’s stated official policies for improper and seemingly arbitrary reasons while simultaneously leaving answers and comments that clearly violate Quora’s official policies completely untouched.

I previously discussed Quora Moderation’s arbitrariness in a post I wrote back in February of this year. In this post, however, I want to talk about some more events that have happened since then that have greatly furthered my disliking for Quora Moderation. In particular, I want to bring to attention a recent incident in which, for unclear reasons, Quora Moderation seems to have effectively taken the side of Holocaust deniers.

My ongoing problem of Quora Moderation collapsing everything I write

For some reason, Quora Moderation has immediately and automatically collapsed every single answer I have written in the past two and a half months that has included any kind of link to any web address of any kind other than Quora itself, without sending me any kind of notification and without giving me any opportunity to appeal for my answers to be uncollapsed.

What’s more, the answers I write don’t even show up as collapsed when I view them from my account. I only know that they are collapsed because other users on Quora have told me that they show up as collapsed when they are logged in and, if I log out and view the page of a question that I have answered, my answers don’t show up, but all the other answers to the question do.

If I write an answer that does not include any links or only includes links to Quora itself, then Quora Moderation does not collapse it. It therefore seems that this is some new unwritten policy meant to prevent anyone from linking to other websites. The problem is that, if I’m not allowed to link other websites, that makes it very difficult to cite anything online.

A space on Quora dedicated to promoting Holocaust denial

The phenomenon I have just described has been going on for months. A recent event, however, has really made my blood boil. For background, Alex Mann is a guy who often writes answers about history on Quora. He and I disagree vehemently about most political subjects, since his views are much more conservative than mine, but one thing I do respect him for is that he has been taking something of a public stand for roughly the past year or so against Holocaust deniers and Neo-Nazis on the platform.

Yesterday, Mann wrote an answer to a question which brought to my attention the existence of a space on Quora calling itself “Holocaust Forensics,” which is exclusively dedicated to promoting Holocaust denial and antisemitism. Mann concludes his answer by not-so-subtly hinting that his readers should report the space to Quora Moderation so that the mods will hopefully take action against it.

After reading Mann’s answer, I went to the space and saw what was there. I was not surprised by what I found. After all, I’ve already known for the past year or so that Quora is hosting at least two openly white nationalist/Neo-Nazi spaces, both of which I have reported to Quora Moderation in the past to no avail. (The first of these white nationalist/Neo-Nazi spaces is a very large space calling itself “It’s OK to be White,” which currently has over 22,000 followers. The second is a smaller, more overtly Neo-Nazi space calling itself “White Traditionalism,” which only has 984 followers.) Despite these past experiences, though, I was still thoroughly appalled.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the heading at the top of the Holocaust denial space “Holocaust Forensics” on Quora

Admittedly, the space does have a sidebar on the right-hand side of the page with the heading “Details,” which claims: “This group is not a Holocaust denial group.” This assertion, however, is plainly contradicted by the actual content of the space.

Every single post in the space is dedicated to promoting false assertions that the Nazis killed vastly fewer Jewish people than they actually did, that some specific aspect of the Holocaust is a hoax, that the Nazi extermination camps were merely or primarily slave labor camps (when, in reality, their primary purpose was to exterminate Jews and, in some cases, other people whom the Nazis deemed undesirable as well), and that Jews are trying to “censor” the truth.

Even the exact same bullet point in the “Details” section that claims that they are “not a Holocaust denial group,” immediately goes on to rant about the supposed “delirium of Jewish supremacism, Zionist activism, or Hasbara censorship.”

Obviously, Holocaust deniers are not usually just going to come out and openly say that they believe that the Holocaust never really happened and that a global Jewish conspiracy somehow fabricated all the mountains of evidence for it, including physical remains, photographs, eyewitness testimony from literally hundreds of thousands of survivors, camp guards, and Nazi officers, et cetera ad infinitum. They know that, if they say that, they are going to drive people away and possibly get themselves banned from the platform. Thus, instead, they typically use a subtler tactic of gradually undermining people’s confidence that the Holocaust really happened by undermining individual aspects of it.

My response

Quora has a policy page titled “What is Quora’s policy on Spaces?” If you go to that page, it has a list of kinds of content that are officially prohibited in Quora spaces. On that list, there is a section titled “Harmful misinformation,” which expressly lists “Holocaust denial” as a kind of harmful misinformation that is prohibited.

ABOVE: Screenshot showing Quora’s official policy on spaces, which very clearly and explicitly prohibits Holocaust denial

In response to this situation, I reported the space “Holocaust Forensics” to Quora Moderation as violating Quora’s policy against promoting harmful misinformation. Then, I wrote a relatively short answer to the same question to which Mann had written his answer, in which I pointed out the specific Quora policy that the space violated and encouraged my readers to report it to moderation as violating that specific policy.

As of the time I am writing this post, Quora Moderation has taken absolutely no action that I am aware of against the space “Holocaust Forensics”—but, within merely a few minutes after I posted my answer, Quora Moderation permanently deleted it, classifying it as “spam,” even though it contained no links to any sites other than Quora and only two links in total (one a link to Mann’s answer, the other a link to Quora’s policy on spaces page). Moderation gave me no opportunity to appeal to have my answer restored. They did at least have the courtesy, though, to notify me that they had deleted my answer this time.

ABOVE: Screenshot showing the notifications that Quora Moderation sent me informing me that they had deleted my answer in which I had called for readers to report the space “Holocaust Forensics” to moderation

Why does Quora tolerate Neo-Nazism and Holocaust denial despite officially prohibiting them?

There are only two reasons I can think of that might explain why Quora allows spaces like “Holocaust Forensics,” “It’s OK to be White,” and “White Traditionalism” to exist, despite the fact that all of these spaces are exclusively dedicated to content that clearly violates Quora’s official policies.

The first possible explanation is that Quora Moderation simply believes what the spaces claim about themselves and has not bothered to look at the spaces’ actual content. If this is the case, then the spaces’ continued existence can be attributed to the moderators’ laziness and/or gullibility.

The second possibility is more sinister. It is possible that Quora Moderation fully realizes that these spaces promote white supremacy, Neo-Nazism, and Holocaust denial in obvious contravention of Quora’s own officially stated policies, but they tolerate the spaces anyway, ignoring their own official policy which explicitly prohibits such content, either because the people behind moderation are themselves privately sympathetic to Neo-Nazism and Holocaust denial or because they think that maintaining such spaces is financially profitable and they are willing to give Neo-Nazis, antisemites, and white supremacists a platform as long as they think that it will make them more profit.

Whichever way you interpret this, it clearly does not reflect well on Quora Moderation.

Conclusion

I’m getting very sick of Quora at this point. The only reason why I keep writing on that site is because I have enough followers and am involved in enough spaces that I can still get a significant number of views and upvotes on most of my answers that are collapsed.

It still really bothers me, though, that nearly everything I write on Quora gets automatically collapsed now for no apparent reason other than including links. Meanwhile, other people are freely allowed to post propaganda promoting blatant racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, Neo-Nazism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and basically any other kind of bigotry you can think of under the sun—all seemingly without having their answers collapsed, without getting banned, and without facing any repercussions. Quora is a mess. Quora Moderation seriously needs to get its act together, but, sadly, I don’t expect that it will.