Facebook and other social media platforms removed less than 12% of reported antisemitic content. Moreover, Facebook failed to take down Fatah sites that openly promote violence against Israelis.
semitic and anti-Israeli content removal requests, even when the content openly instigates racism and violence. As reported by the Fighting Online Antisemitism (FOA) organization whose purpose is to monitor and report such content every hour and a half, only 12% of the reported antisemitic posts published on social media platforms have been removed.
Meanwhile, in response to a complaint from “Palestinean Media Watch,” (PMW) the police launched an investigation into Facebook, claiming that the company failed to remove pages linked to the Fatah organization, even though those pages promote violence against Israelis.
These charges have gone unanswered by Facebook. Ynet reported that Facebook representatives responsible for the company’s anti-Palestinian and anti-antisemitic policies are based in Dublin, Ireland, which angers Facebook representatives in Israel.
According to FOA’s report, 500 antisemitic posts published on various social media platforms during September deal with conspiracy theories that tie Jews to the COVID-19 outburst and with trying to “conquer the world,” using the vaccinations as their means. The month before, similar hate content was uploaded, blaming Jews for 9/11. Most of the posts are in English, with a few in Russian, Spanish, and other languages.
According to FOA founder Tomer Aldubi, “online monitoring is essential to eliminate conspiratorial and false facts directed against the Jewish people. Our volunteers work 24 hours a day to clean the internet of racism and hatred. We closely monitor the ‘gray area’ existing between freedom of speech and content removal by social media, and we work around the clock to resolve it. Meanwhile, content denying Israel’s fundamental right to exist is not removed from social media, as it is not considered hate speech. This reason is why we have been working on expanding each platform’s policy to include the removal of this content.”
“Palestinean Media Watch” reported that the police are investigating a complaint against Facebook for allegedly aiding terrorism. This is a result of violent incidents that occurred in the West Bank during April this year. PMW claims that the Palestinian Authorities enticed the public to begin a new wave of terrorism and violence “for the protection of Jerusalem,” via online content appearing in 9 “Fatah” Facebook pages. PMW demanded that Facebook remove those pages, and when they did not, filed a complaint against Facebook Israel and the CEO, Adi Soffer-Tani.
Palestinian Media Watch” came out with a statement demanding that Facebook “cease being a platform for the Palestinian Authority and the Fatah movement to promote terrorism and shut down the Fatah pages that have been encouraging terrorism for years.”
PMW also approached US Congress members, recommending they investigate “in what way Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg were involved in the decisions to enable Facebook to be a platform for Fatah for encouraging terrorism and violence against Israeli’s and Jews.”
