Goodreads urged to take down reviews of Holocaust denial books
'As a book review site, our goal is to provide a place for people to discuss their views on books – even if the book is controversial or has content that may be objectionable'
The website Goodreads appears to have ignored calls to take down reviews of Holocaust denial books from its platform.
A Change.org petition, which has garnered over 240 signatures since it was uploaded last week, calls on the book review website to take down entries for Peter Winter’s The Six Million: Fact or Fiction? and the 1974 pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die?.
The Amazon-owned website allows users to search its database of books and post their own reviews and ratings. It contains 90 million reviews in total, according to figures published by Goodreads.
“If you care about truth, respect for survivors, and preventing anti semitism and acts of hate, make an impact by signing this petition to get GoodReads to remove these books from their shelves for good”, the petition says.
Both titles have received overwhelmingly positive ratings from dozens of Goodreads users and handfuls of reviews.
An automatically-generated sidebar on the web-page about Did Six Million Really Die? offers personalised recommendations of titles deemed similar. They include Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the forged antisemitic pamphlet The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
When approached by Jewish News for comment, a spokesperson for Goodreads said in a statement: “As a book review site, our goal is to provide a place for people to discuss their views on books – even if the book is controversial or has content that may be objectionable.
“We take the responsibility of supporting our community of readers very seriously and listen carefully to any concerns raised by our members. Hate speech is not tolerated and reviews or comments that contain hate speech will be deleted.”
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