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What led Facebook to announce in the end that it would remove posts that referred to the Jews of the world, or that they would come with “black-faced caricatures,” two hate speech bureaucracies that are more than a century old?
Was the letter, sent on August 5, from the attorneys general of 20 states to Mark Zuckerberg, asking the company to do more to prevent hateful content and abuse on its platform?
Was the open letter, published on 7 August, from more than 120 Jewish organizations urging Facebook to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism known around the world and to eliminate messages that are compatible with that definition?
Is this summer’s publicity boycott, led by the Anti-Defamation League and the NAACP, which has noticed a rally of giant multinationals and even caused a brief drop in Facebook’s percentage price?
According to Facebook, none of those answers.
The concept of banning content that promotes stereotypes of the Jewish world came here a year ago, in an assembly with several Jewish teams convened through Facebook, and was basically driven through the World Jewish Congress.
“We congratulate Facebook on its leadership and hope that this resolution will be a consultant for other social media corporations to follow,” Congressional President Ronald Lauder said in a message to Jewish Insider.
The site now officially prohibits content that refers to “Jews who run global or giant establishments such as media networks, the economy, or the government.”
The express prohibitions of content announced Tuesday through Facebook are based on some stereotypes I had already identified: posts that compare Jews to rats, or that depict blacks with agricultural or Mexican machinery as worms.
Facebook’s policy update has attracted praise from some teams and the relucting popularity of others. Organizations that have prompted Facebook to take strong action against Holocaust denial or remove any content that meets the International Alliance for Holocaust Remembrance definition of anti-Semitism say the substitution is too small and too late.
“This is a welcome but expected step in the Facebook component,” ADL Executive Chairman Jonathan Greenblatt said in an email statement. “It is regrettable that the platform has taken so long to end this social bureaucracy of hatred, when it is transparent that they deserve that they have not been allowed to proliferate.”
In fact, no more of Facebook’s role as an announcer and guilty of hate speech.
An exam published Tuesday through the ADL found that Facebook actively suggests that its users register in anti-Semitic and white supremacist groups.
An internal Research by Facebook, the effects of which were received through NBC, showed that there are thousands of teams and pages, with millions of followers, that the QAnon conspiracy theory. Facebook has been a key platform in the expansion of the network around this conspiracy theory, which experts say includes many other people with anti-Semitic views.
This expansion has an effect on the genuine world: on Tuesday, a congressional candidate in Georgia who made her confidence in QAnon’s conspiracy theory a central component of her crusade and called the multimillion-dollar Jewish philanthropist Nazi, winning her district’s Republican primary. .
Some organizations that have pressured Facebook to make it more difficult with hate speech have welcomed the changes.
In a statement, Daniel Elbaum, AJC’s leading defense officer, called Facebook’s new policy “a step in the right direction and our ongoing conversations with Facebook executives in the United States, Europe, and Israel.”
But other organizations have criticized Facebook for going further.
Mort Klein, director of the Zionist Organization of America, said it was a “tragic mistake” in the Facebook component not to adopt the definition of anti-Semitism enacted through the International Alliance for Holocaust Remembrance, which includes ancient anti-Semitic tropos such as the Jew of the world, but also comparisons between Israelis and Nazis and hold Jews accountable for Israeli policies or actions.
In May, Peter Stern, director of stakeholder engagement for Facebook’s content policy, said in a verbal exchange with an AJC representative that some elements of the International Alliance for Holocaust Remembrance’s definition of anti-Semitism had “mapped”. Israel, because it does not need to penalize others for criticizing Israel.
“By not taking this step, I increase my concern that existing ones will allow anti-Semitism to develop without a strong reaction,” Klein said. He added that the letters he had sent to Facebook about the definition had won “pro forma” responses.
ADL’s Greenblatt criticized Facebook for failing to take a stronger stance on Holocaust denial and called the company “disturbing” to classify those posts as “dissatisfied” and not as a form of hate speech opposed to a group.
“I’m Jewish and there’s an organization of other people who deny that the Holocaust happened,” he said in an interview with Kara Swisher of Recode. “I find it deeply shocking. But at the end of the day, I don’t think our platform deserves to eliminate that because I think there are things other people are talking about. I don’t think they’re deliberatelyArray’
Facebook still allows for erroneous and false statements about the Holocaust, but it removes messages that celebrate or otherwise protect the Holocaust, or make the Holocaust or survivors laugh, Cutler said. When asked if there was content on Facebook that denies the Holocaust but is not anti-Semitic in a different way, Cutler said the site moderates those content elements on a case-by-case basis.
“We know that many other people disagree with our position at all, and we respect it,” Cutler said. “We have a team committed to developing and reviewing our policies and welcome collaboration with industry, experts and other teams because we are doing well.”
Ari Feldman is editor of Forward. Get in touch with him on [email protected] or with him on Twitter at aefeldman
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