Month: August 2018

Mapbox, the mapping startup that competes with the likes of Google Maps and Here to power location services on apps like Snapchat and Foursquare, says that a version of its New York map calling the city ‘Jewtropolis’ was an act of human vandalism that has now been removed across the hundreds of apps that pull in Mapbox data and are used by over 400 million people.

“This is now 100 percent fixed and should have never happened. It’s disgusting,” Mapbox CEO and founder Eric Gundersen told TechCrunch. He says that Mapbox has built a large system that uses both AI and human checks to look out for vandalism. “We’re constantly scanning for this, and it’s an error on our part [to have missed it].”

The issue of the mis-named map using the anti-Semitic slur came to light earlier today, with a number of people flagging the glitch on social media and the issue also getting picked up by multiple media outlets.

Gundersen said that the company is still trying to figure out what specifically happened here (we’ll update as we learn more).

The company uses more than 130 sources of data to build its maps, and picks up incrementally more each time its maps are used in apps around the world (over 400 million people use its maps by way of third-party apps). While this is an interesting, and in many ways very clever, approach to building a data set as a smaller business that is miles away from the likes of a Google in terms of size and scale, this glitch highlights one of the pitfalls of relying on other people’s data.

Some are speculating that the vandalised map could have come from a vandalised version of OpenStreetMap, the open-source mapping project that is one of the data sources used by Mapbox. The reason: similarly defaced data was detected on OSM some weeks ago. But Gundersen cautioned against drawing a line between the two.

“The reality is that OpenStreetMap is just one part of what we use,” he said. “Mapbox is made from about 130 different sources of data.” He also compared Mapbox’s data set to Waze’s. “With over 400 million people using our maps, the more that they’re used, the more data we get.”

Mapbox pushed out a new updating system recently that allows it to update maps faster and to flag suspicious items. Gundersen said that the company is currently “digging into that and seeing if there is a flag off. You design for this never happening, and then it does.”

Mapbox has raised over $227 million in funding, with the most recent round being $164 million led by Softbank’s Vision Fund.

InVision today announced a newly expanded integration and strategic partnership with Atlassian that will let users of Confluence, Trello and Jira see and share InVision prototypes from within those programs.

Atlassian’s product suite is built around making product teams faster and more efficient. These tools streamline and organize communication so developers and designers can focus on getting the job done. Meanwhile, InVision’s collaboration platform has caught on to the idea that design is now a team sport, letting designers, engineers, executives and other shareholders be involved in the design process right from the get-go.

Specifically, the expanded integration allows designers to share InVision Studio designs and prototypes right within Jira, Trello and Confluence . InVision Studio was unveiled late last year, offering designers an alternative to Sketch and Adobe.

Given the way design and development teams use both product suites, it only makes sense to let these product suites communicate with one another.

As part of the partnership, Atlassian has also made a strategic financial investment in InVision, though the companies declined to share the amount.

Here’s what InVision CEO Clark Valberg had to say about it in a prepared statement:

In today’s digital world creating delightful, highly effective customer experiences has become a central business imperative for every company in the world. InVision and Atlassian represent the essential platforms for organizations looking to unleash the potential of their design and development teams. We’re looking forward to all the opportunities to deepen our relationship on both a product and strategic basis, and build toward a more cohesive digital product operating system that enables every organization to build better products, faster.

InVision has been working to position itself as the Salesforce of the design world. Alongside InVision and InVision Studio, the company has also built out an asset and app store, as well as launched a small fund to invest in design startups. In short, InVision wants the design ecosystem to revolve around it.

Considering that InVision has raised more than $200 million, and serves 4 million users, including 80 percent of the Fortune 500, it would seem that the strategy is paying off.

Down a two lane road on the outskirts of Princeton, Ky., next to a cemetery and past the Light of Truth Church is the Porter Road Butcher Meat Co. facility — a staging ground for what the Nashville-based startup Porter Road hopes will be a revolution in the American meatpacking industry.

For the company’s co-founders, James Peisker and Chris Carter, the refashioning of the meat business in America is the next step in a nearly decade-long journey since the former chefs first met working in the restaurant of Nashville’s historic Hermitage Hotel. 

The two men started their butcher business, selling locally sourced meat from the East Nashville Farmer’s Market in 2010 and eventually moved to a storefront in the same neighborhood a year later.

“We ended up going around and raising funds and opened the brick and mortar shop in 2011,” Peisker said. “Chris worked a job at a friend of ours’ deli in the morning and I worked at a restaurant at night.”

But from the beginning the two men had bigger ambitions, and as the business became increasingly successful, they began thinking about how to bring their approach to the meat industry to the entire country.

“What we see the future is is being able to reach as many people as we can in the country and offer them the best quality most sustainably raised products,” said Carter in an interview. 

As they began building the business in earnest, the two men realized that there was a critical part of the process over which they had no control — the meat processing itself.

“I would love to be Omaha Steaks,” said Carter. “But I would love to bring change to the system that Omaha Steaks buys into.” To do that meant not just sourcing from sustainable farms, but making sure that their slaughterhouse and processing facility was operating to standards that the two co-founders set for themselves.

“They put up the curtain to hide what’s happening,” said Peisker of the meat industry — although the dirty side of industrial animal husbandry is well known. “99% of the meat is coming from these really disgusting places where the animals are near death and kept alive with injections… Tyson can say they get their chickens from family farm but] they sell the farmers feed, and chicks… small family farms are raising these animals but are doing it in a way that harms the animal. And our beef is born in the same matter. It’s how they spend the end of their lives. They’re force fed chickenshit, chicken feathers, scrap and harvested in a manner that’s doing 60,000 head a day.”

Peisker and Carter envision a different path, one that’s decentralizing the commodity meat industry. Instead of industrial farms producing thousands of head, smaller sustainable farms could raise livestock in the hundreds. Those sustainably raised animals could then be sent to local processing plants and slaughtered in facilities that are better for workers and (more) humane for animals.

“One of the first things we did was to take away the electric prod sticks and cattle paddles,” said Peisker. Ultimately the men recognize that there’s only so much that can be done to make the industry operate more efficiently and humanely, but every little bit helps.

The alternative is continuing to operate at scales that are toxic for the entire country. For example, earlier this month a jury in North Carolina awarded residents near a Smithfield Farms hog farm $470 million to address their complaints about the stench and the industrial pollution coming from the farm.

In all, industrial animal farms operated by just four companies produce 80% of the meat U.S. consumers eat. And the environmental impact of these industrial farms is well understood.

For Ryan Darnell, a managing partner of Max Ventures (and childhood friend of Carter’s), the Porter Road business makes good business sense beyond its social and environmental benefits.

“In this category there’s roughly $55 billion of revenue tied up in the traditional supply chain,” Darnell wrote in an email. “Porter Road isn’t just selling meat online. They are rearchitecting the back-end system to eliminate a lot of the things we don’t like (and aren’t good for us). They are building an entirely new meat company from the ground up.”

Companies like CrowdCow and ButcherBox offer organic meat for sale, but Darnell said that the vertical integration that Porter Road has built makes it a fundamentally different company from those startups.

“Most of the competitors in this space have a digital storefront (for distribution) and buy out of the existing supply chain. A few will try to backwards integrate, but it’s difficult to learn how to accurately evaluate farmers and implement best practices in a processing facility,” Darnell wrote.

All of this attention to detail in the process is also reflected in the price of Porter Road’s meats (they aren’t cheap). But the notion for Peisker is that people can eat fewer, higher quality meat meals with Porter Road products (which may also be better for the environment too).

“You should eat less meat but better meat,” said Peisker. “There’s a movement across the country of people who want flavor back in their food…. And people who want to make a choice with their dollar about what they buy.”

Porter Road’s evolution — which culminated in the company launching an online presence in 2017 — is coming at a time when shifting consumption patterns are changing the ways Americans shop and eat.

The Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods has changed the organic market as the once-mighty grocery chain becomes more incorporated into the Seattle e-commerce giant’s commercial operations. That’s opened the doors for direct to consumer competitors to come in — including companies like Thrive Market, Crowd Cow and Porter Road.

“Whole Foods, post-Amazon is just another grocery store now,” said Peisker. 

And Americans continue to love organic foods. Sales of organic food products hit a record $45.2 billion in 2017, according to the Organic Trade Association. While growth slowed to 6.7% from 9% in 2016, the overall numbers are still surpassing the anemic 1% growth of the U.S. food business overall, according to the report.

Porter Road’s founders say those numbers are reflected in its own business. “We get busier every day,” said Carter. Over the summer the company was averaging 60 boxes shipped per-day with roughly 5-8 pounds of meat in a box.

With the boost from the $3.7 million in venture funding it received earlier in the year backed by investors including Max Ventures, Slow Ventures, BoxGroup, Tribeca Venture Partners, Collaborative Fund, and Great Oaks VC, Porter Road is hoping to expand its operations.

“Our plan is to build,” Carter said. “We’ve built this amazing model in this location. We have a year or two before we see ourselves busting at the seams here. And we will move to communities across the country.”

The co-founders of Porter Road see opportunities to open a similar processing facility to the one already operating in Princeton — and ideally will be able to build a network of abattoirs around the country. “If we can make a better life for the animals that go into our food system and better food for consumers why wouldn’t we do it?” said Peisker. 

Girls Who Code, an organization focused on closing the gender gap in tech, has raised $1 million from Lyft riders since the ride-hailing company added the non-profit organization to its Round Up & Donate program last year.

The program allows participating charities, which has included Habitat for Humanity and World Wildlife Fund, to receive small donations from Lyft riders, who can opt-in by visiting the Round Up & Donate tab within settings in the Lyft app. Launched in May 2017, the feature rounds up your trip payments to the nearest dollar and donates the difference.

“We couldn’t be more excited to be celebrating the $1 million milestone with our friends at Lyft,” Girls Who Code founder and CEO Reshma Saujani said in a statement. “And the moment is made even more special knowing that this was made possible by the riders themselves.”

Girls Who Code has received a lot of support from the tech industry, with backing from Amazon, Pivotal Ventures, GM, AppNexus, Google, Dell and more.

Uber has also provided financial support. The company donated $1.2 million to Girls Who Code as part of a partnership announced last August that had Uber’s former chief brand officer Bozoma Saint John join the organization’s board of directors. Saint John has since left Uber but remains on Girls Who Code’s board.

Uber was working feverishly to support non-profits, especially those focused on diversity, as part of its effort to clean up its reputation following numerous reports that Travis Kalanick, Uber’s former CEO, had fostered a culture of discrimination and harassment during his tenure. One of the organizations they tried to donate to was Black Girls Code, but the non-profit turned down the cash, explaining at the time that they weren’t interested in what they believed was only a PR stunt.

“Their past history and ‘political’ nature of maneuvering is and was troubling,” Black Girls Code founder Kimberly Bryant told TechCrunch at the time.

Black Girls Code has, however, accepted donations from Lyft via its Round Up & Donate feature. Bryant has said its because Lyft’s mission more closely aligns with Black Girls Code: “We look very closely at prospective partners with that in mind and pay special attention to those that believe in the power of community to affect change. Through the work they’ve done over the years, we know Lyft embodies these same attributes.”

Black Girls Code was founded in 2011, the same year as Girls Who Code. Both organizations encourage young women to code through programming like immersion summer camps and after-school programs.

Fewer than 1 in 4 computer scientists are women, a number that may only be decreasing. According to Girls Who Code, 37% of computer scientists were women in 1995, though that number fell to 24% in 2017 and is projected to drop to 22% by 2027.

New data out this week, however, says that the number of young women taking the AP Computer Science exam rose 39% this year, per Code.org.

 

Angela Strange, who joined the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz nearly four years ago and has been quietly working alongside general partner Alex Rampell on a wide variety of fintech deals, has herself been named a general partner.

The promotion is interesting on a few levels, starting with what may be the most obvious development to outsiders: Strange is now the third person who has been named general partner at the nine-year-old outfit over the last three months. Notably, she is the third woman to be named general partner since the firm announced its first female general partner in June.

Andreessen Horowitz now has 13 general partners altogether.

For those wanting to see more diversity at the country’s top venture firms, the firm’s moves are a welcome development. They are also a little surprising, particularly considering how delicate venture partnerships tend to be, and the typical pace of announcing general partners, which is rarely ever monthly, even at the biggest firms in the world. (In fairness, Andreessen Horowitz isn’t exactly known for caring much about tradition.)

Strange is also just the second general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z) who has been promoted from within, preceded only by Connie Chan, whose promotion to general partner we reported last month. Why that matters: a16z has historically had an express policy “not to promote internally,” as explained to us last month by general partner Jeff Jordan, who joined in 2011 after serving for years as the president and CEO of OpenTable. That policy had become antiquated over time, as a16z has grown and the operating functions that support its portfolio companies have matured, he said.

That shift in thinking helped enabled Strange’s quick rise within the firm, where, as Rampell outlined in a call yesterday, she has won both the admiration of her colleagues and established a rapport with many of the firm’s portfolio companies, some of which she has been serving as a board observer. (With her promotion, Strange will now begin taking board seats.)

The firm’s broadening bench of general partners is also presumably tied fundraising. Notably, a16z hasn’t announced a new flagship fund since 2016, and most firms roll out new funds every two to three years, meaning a new fund — or even funds — will be coming in the not-too-distant future.

Consider the firm’s first female general partner, Katie Haun, who spent more than a decade as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, and well as worked as the DOJ’s first-ever coordinator for digital assets.

Haun’s new role with a16z was announced in June when the firm closed its first “crypto” fund, a $300 million vehicle that she is now actively investing alongside general partner Chris Dixon, who joined the firm as its seventh partner back in late 2012.

It isn’t so hard to envision a separate effort similarly spearheaded by Strange and Rampell, particularly in light of a new report in Axios that a16z is moving away from raising enormous flagship funds and instead toward sector-specific funds, including its two bio funds. (Asked yesterday, the firm declined to comment on whether Axios’s report was accurate or if other, targeted funds might be in the works.)

Either way, the fintech portfolio that Rampell and Strange have been piecing together stands out. Among a16z’s many related bets to date are the so-called unicorn companies Robinhood, Stripe, and Transferwise. The firm has also placed numerous bets on startups that seem to be innovating in their respective fields, including Point, a three-year-old startup that lends money to people and receives partial ownership of their homes in return; OpenDoor, a five-year-old service that will make an offer on a homeowner’s house sight unseen; and OpenInvest, a three-year-old asset management startup with a social impact bent.

Strange — a Stanford MBA and serious marathoner who earlier spent four years as a product manager at Google, as well as worked earlier in VC in a more junior role — appears to have more up her sleeve, too.

In conversation yesterday, she told us while the firm remains interested in lending startups (“there are a lot of new creative models that can be applied”) and real estate as an asset class, a growing area of interest for both her and Rampell is so-called insurtech. “It’s very much in its infancy,” said Strange, noting that “one out of 10 companies in the S&P 500 is a insurance company, yet there are no new entrants to that group.”

Thanks to data, that will change soon, in her view. “Data to better underwrite and data to allow you to find and attract customers in a more efficient way . .   .” it’s coming, she suggested. And no matter the fund from which she and Rampell are investing, a16z will have its checkbook ready.

Toward the end of 2017, Instacart penned a partnership with one of the country’s biggest grocery retailers, Kroger. At the time, it was a smaller deal with one of Kroger’s chains called Ralphs.

But today Instacart is expanding its partnership with Kroger, bringing Instacart delivery to 75 additional Kroger markets, growing Instacart’s Kroger footprint by 50 percent nationwide. The expansion will be completed by late October, bringing Instacart delivery to more than 1,600 Kroger stores.

This builds on Instacart’s momentum, following partnership deals with chains like Albertsons, Aldi, Sam’s Club, and Loblaw.

In all, Instacart is now available to 70 percent of all households across the country. Last year, the company announced its goal to reach 80 percent of U.S. households by the end of 2018, and its most recent funding round seems to be propelling the startup to achieve that goal.

In February, Instacart raised $200 million led by Coatue Management, as well as Glade Brook Capital Partners and existing investors. The round valued Instacart at $4.2 billion.

Since Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods, Instacart has been put in a challenging position. But, in many ways, that challenge has represented opportunity. The nearly $14 billion acquisition has spurred an even more rapid evolution of the grocery industry, leaving incumbents with a choice: Acquire (or build) your own delivery platform or partner with Instacart to compete with online grocery purchase and delivery from Amazon.

Some retailers, like Target, have chosen to purchase their own platform. But other big players, such as Albertsons and Sam’s Club, seem to have been motivated by the Whole Foods deal to partner up with Instacart.

This has grown Instacart’s marketplace to feature more than 300 different retail partners on the platform, which has in turn helped grow Instacart’s community of shoppers, which has topped 50,000 this year.

As this growth continues, a great deal is dependent on Instacart’s ability to maintain the quality of the product. But the company is also taking steps toward shoring up the platform. Instacart has begun testing a partnership with Postmates to help make deliveries during peak hours in San Francisco.

UK payday loans firm Wonga, whose investors include high profile European VC firms Accel and Balderton, appears to be teetering on the brink of collapse as it’s stopped taking new loans.

A spokeswoman for the company confirmed to TechCrunch it is not accepting new loan applications.

She sent us the below statement which has been posted on Wonga’s mobile website (although it was not visible to us on the desktop site at the time of writing — and it was still possible to attempt to apply for a loan there, though the page subsequently returned a broken link).

Wonga’s statement reads:  “While it continues to assess its options Wonga has decided to stop taking loan applications. If you are an existing customer you can continue to use our services to manage your loan. Click here for more information.”

The spokeswoman declined to comment further on the status of the company but speculation is rising that Wonga is about to fold.

The Guardian reports the company held emergency talks with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority on Wednesday over the impact of its collapse on existing customers.

While the BBC reports that the firm has arranged for Grant Thornton to act as administrators.

Wonga has been in trouble for some years, after regulators clamped down on the payday loans sector.

In 2014 the company agreed with the financial regulator to a £220M write down having lent money to people without properly assessing their ability to pay it back.

It was further censured for sending fake lawyers’ letters to customers in arrears — and had to pay out a further £2.6M in compensation for that.

Wonga has since made an attempt to reinvent itself — with a focus on flexible loan products — but the costs associated with its legacy behavior kept rising.

And earlier this month it emerged that Wonga’s investors had injected $10M into the business to fund rising numbers of compensation claims related to its past conduct.

In recent times the company has also been selling off assets — passing off its German payments business, BillPay, to Klarna last year, for around £60M.

Prior to this month’s $10M investor injection, the 2006 founded firm had raised around £145.5M in VC — from a string of VCs including Accel, Balderton, Oak Investment, Meritech Capital, 83North, Dawn Capital and HV Holtzbrinck Ventures.

It looks very unlikely any of them will be getting their money back.

Chalk up yet another Brexit deficit: Japanese electronics firm Panasonic will be moving its European headquarters from the UK to Amsterdam in October because it’s worried about the tax implications if it stays, the Nikkei Asian Review reports.

The company is concerned it could face tax liabilities if the UK shifts its corporate tax regime as a result of Brexit.

Laurent Abadie, CEO of Panasonic Europe, told the publication Japan could treat the U.K. as a tax haven if the country lowers its corporate rate — as the government has indeed suggested it will to try to make itself a more attractive destination for businesses once it’s outside the European Union’s trading bloc.

In November 2016 the UK Prime Minister announced a review of the country’s corporate tax rate — saying the government could move to substantially cut the rate below the current 20%.

Prior to that, former chancellor George Osborne pledged to cut the rate to below 15%.

At the same time as announcing the rate review, the PM unveiled a package of business-focused measures — intended to try to quell fears around Brexit. Although a rate cut evidently isn’t friendly to every business.

In the case of Panasonic, it’s concerned that if the U.K. gets designated a tax-haven by Japan it could be saddled with back taxes back home. So moving to stay regionally headquartered within the European Union removes that risk.

Abadie also told the Nikkei Asian Review that moving its regional HQ to continental Europe will help it avoid any barriers to the flow of people and goods thrown up by Brexit.

The shape of any deal — or even whether there will be a deal between the UK and the EU, post-Brexit — still remains to be seen just a few months before the UK is scheduled to exit the EU, in March 2019. So businesses are having to make key decisions based on possible or potential outcomes.

Meanwhile the UK’s regulatory influence in the region continues to be diminished…

Garmin continues to go head-to-head with Fitbit with the launch of its latest offering — the vivosmart 4 activity tracker. This sleek new wristband not only tracks steps, activities and gives you the weather but also comes with a blood oxygen sensor and will tell you how much energy you have saved up for your next full throttle burn session.

That new body battery energy calculator estimates the body’s energy reserves to help you figure out when you feel more rundown and why. You simply swipe through the menu on the display to get to your energy levels or a number of other data offerings like steps, heart rate, stress levels and stairs climbed. The blood oxygen sensor will tell you how well oxygen is being pumped from your heart to the farthest regions of your body and can help you figure out if you are getting a good sleep in.

I took the new vivosmart 4 for a spin this week and was not disappointed in the upgrades. First off, this is a very nice looking piece of jewelry. Its slim, fashionable design fits neatly on the wrist and comes in berry with gold bezel, powder grey with rose gold bezel, azure blue with silver bezel, and black with slate bezel. It also feels good to wear. The material is smooth, soft and lightweight, slipping on easily.

The new model comes equipped with a newly redesigned wrist-based heart rate sensor, VO2 max and tracker for various activities like running, strength training and yoga.

One other interesting feature includes stress level measurement tool that will remind you to relax and take a breath throughout your busy work day.

Like its predecessor, the vivosmart 3, the 4 comes with the ability to check the weather, play music, and receive text message updates. It is safe to use under water so it can be worn in the shower or if you want to go for a swim.

The battery life is also strong enough to stay charged for up to a week at a time. Compare that to the Fitbit HR and Charge 2, which last up to five days.

The body energy feature is also a nice touch. The tracker figures out your energy levels using a combination of data including heart rate, sleep, stress levels and activity from the previous few days so it will likely take a while to figure out how much output you’ve got before a workout.

Overall, I’d say it’s a nice watch to hang on your bod. However, there are some drawbacks. The display is hard to work with. I found I had to tap several times, not just twice, as the instructions indicate. It’s also not very intuitive to maneuver and doesn’t pick up immediately that you are trying to swipe through the menu at times. You’ll need to take some time playing around with it to get the hang of it.

This is an activity tracker I would like to recommend for the fitness and life balance oriented individual, except for the difficulty in navigating the screen. That is one area that could be vastly improved by the manufacturer and would put it at the top of my list for trackers instead of somewhere in the middle.

For those interested, the vivosmart 4 will retail for about $130 and can be found online or at a sports gear shop near you.

Facebook moderators temporarily removed a post by the Anne Frank Center which was seeking to raise awareness about the Holocaust, after the company was unable to distinguish between historical genocide and child nudity.

The post included an archive photograph of Jewish children who had been stripped and starved by Nazi Germany.

Between 1941 and 1945 the German state imprisoned and murdered millions of Jews in concentration and death camps — the child Anne Frank, who the Center is named after, being just one of them.

Frank died in 1945, aged 15, after her hiding place in Amsterdam had been uncovered. She was taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where, seven months later, she died of typhus.

In school history class as a teenager I remember being shown similar footage of the emaciated bodies of Jewish people starved and murdered during the Holocaust.

It’s not the kind of imagery you forget. It is terrible. Haunting. It is a shame of history, not pornography.

Facebook moderators apparently cannot tell the difference.

Around six hours after the Center complained on Twitter that the post had been taken down, Facebook reinstated it.

In a tweet replying to the Center’s complaint the company explains its actions, saying “we don’t allow nude images of children”, before ending with an apology for making the wrong decision in this case — owing to the image having “important historical significance”.

It wrote: “We put your post back up and sent you a message on FB. We don’t allow nude images of children on FB, but we know this is an important image of historical significance and we’ve restored it. We’re sorry and thank you for bringing it to our attention.”

If you’re getting an acute sense of deja-vu that’s because Facebook has similarly failed to understand historical context before — when, for example, in 2016 its moderators took down an iconic war photo of a child fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam in 1972.

The violence had also stripped that child — clothing her with terror.

Again Facebook’s moderators simply couldn’t tell. So they scrubbed historical record from the platform. An outcry was necessary to reinstate it.

Called on that crime against history, Facebook described its moderating decision as a mistake — saying “we intend to do better”.

Two years later there’s no sign it’s living up to that stated intent.

Running the world’s biggest content platform without editorial oversight and with woefully under-resourced moderation is indeed a very hard problem. One that AI cannot hope to solve in any near or short term framework — if ever. Context is king for a reason.

The kicker here is that company founder Mark Zuckerberg continues to choose to provide a platform for Holocaust deniers on Facebook.

He could choose to ban Holocaust denial — which is, after all, an attack on both history and the Jewish people. But he prefers not to. He’s not for banning, unless it’s nudity. (Classic art nudes included, at times.)

And so we arrive at the tragi-ridiculous pass of true historical imagery of the Holocaust being scrubbed from Facebook — while vicious lies about the Holocaust are allowed to stand and swirl and take root via Facebook.

That’s what running a content platform without a moral compass looks like.

We asked Facebook to explain why it took down a post by the Anne Frank Center that was seeking to raise awareness about the Holocaust yet refuses to take down posts by Holocaust deniers who are seeking to undermine historical truth.

A company representative pointed us to its earlier response to the Center — but did not engage with our question.