**UPDATE** SWC to Facebook: "Do Not Serve as a Platform for Hate"

Wiesenthal Centre to Facebook: "Do Not Serve as a Platform for Hate"

In a letter to Facebook co-Founder and CEO/Director, Mark Zuckerberg, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre'sDirector for International Relations, Dr Shimon Samuels, expressed outrage at discovering that the social network Facebook is hosting seven fascist groups based inItaly.

Speaking from the Brussels-based European Parliament, Samuels noted, together with several MEPs andItalian supporters of the Wiesenthal Centre, "It is even more offensive that, on this 70th anniversary of 'Kristallnacht', the prelude to the Holocaust, we find your networkingservice abused for the propagation of attacks on Roma, such as:

'Turn gypsies into fuel',

'Useful work for gypsies: testers of gas chambers', 'Let's burn themall'.

The sites are replete with illustrations of Nazi salutes."

The Centre urged Facebook "to remove these sites forthwith:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=27360450548
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=27686489199
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=28069749899
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=28388725039
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2959297729
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=29882677798
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=3182141814."

The Centre also proposed that Facebook "install appropriate filters to exclude such unwelcomeguests."

Samuels added that "the Simon Wiesenthal Centre has established an acknowledged competence inmonitoring incitement to hate and violence on the Internet, which may assist in preventing Facebook from serving as a platform for hate."

For further information, please contact Shimon Samuels at+33.609.77.01.58.