Facebook has made a habit of pandering to conservatives. This is more likely a result of increased public scrutiny combined with internal employee revolt.
It’s also the least they could do, quite literally. Holocaust denialism is both extremely fringe ideologically, and extremely visible to rich westerners. It’s the easiest and lowest hanging fruit to show that they’re doing something. But I genuinely doubt that it signals a willingness to tackle either more difficult content like misinformation, nor tamp down on the coordinated behavior in less visible (to Americans) places where FB has been central to enabling genocide and other similarly bad things.
In short: it’s a good move, but I suspect it’s more PR than anything else.
Yes. “The Nazis were bad” is, generally, a pretty easy PR statement.
Here, let’s spin up a really hard one. “Given the historical discrimination against Catholics, Facebook should delete all posts that discriminate against Amy Coney Barrett on account of her religion.” Not such an easy PR win there, eh?
In short: it’s a good move, but I suspect it’s more PR than anything else.