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Social Media Giants Failing To Remove Most Antisemitic Posts (axios.com) 140

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Five social media giants failed to remove 84% of antisemitic posts in May and June -- and Facebook performed the worst despite announcing new rules to tackle the problem, a new report finds. Axios: The Center for Countering Digital Hatred (CCDH) notes in its study that it reported 714 posts containing "anti-Jewish hatred" to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and TikTok -- which were collectively viewed 7.3 million times. These "clearly violated" company policies, according to the CCDH. "As a result of their failure to enforce their own rules, social media platforms like Facebook have become safe places to spread racism and propaganda against Jews," states the report, titled "Failure to Act."

Facebook removed 14 out of 129 posts reported to it (10.9%); Twitter removed 15 of 137 reports (11%); TikTok took down 22 of 119 posts reported (18.5%); Instagram acted in 52 of 277 of cases (18.8%) and YouTube pulled 11 of the 52 posts it was alerted to (21.2%). "Extremist anti-Jewish hate is not acted on: platforms failed to act on 80% of posts containing Holocaust denial, 74% of posts alleging the blood libel, 70% of racist caricatures of Jewish people and 70% of neo-Nazi posts," per a statement from the CCDH, a nongovernmental organization based in the U.S. and United Kingdom.
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Social Media Giants Failing To Remove Most Antisemitic Posts More

Social Media Giants Failing To Remove Most Antisemitic Posts

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  • After a year and a half of pandemic (Score:3)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @12:54PM (#61651483)
    I read this as antiseptic posts.

  • It would be interesting to see what would happen if these organization (CCDH among others) had moderating capability.

  • mostly hate (Score:5, Insightful)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @01:01PM (#61651519)

    These platforms are filled with mostly hate messages. If they removed all of the hate from these sites there would not be much left. I'm sure that we can find instances of all types of hate, I don't think jews are singled out here. These companies suck at doing things that hurt their income.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      These platforms are filled with mostly hate messages. If they removed all of the hate from these sites there would not be much left.

        would be like banning trolls, dupes, and political stories from Slashdot

    • These platforms are filled with mostly hate messages.

      If you think that then I really question what fucked up people you have in your friends list.

  • That can't be Reich (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ranger ( 1783 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @01:01PM (#61651521) Homepage
    I did Nazi that coming.

  • They're too busy taking down pro-Trump COVID posts, southern border crisis posts, and anything that paints China in a bad light.

    • Too many people talking about the four police suicides and their recent testimony. Got to make sure people have a place to express themselves and not have their opinions exposed or spreading to others.

    • Re:They don't have time for that (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @02:57PM (#61652193) Journal

      Or, maybe your persecution complex has you living in a fantasy land, and the researchers and FB employees who actually work with this stuff know what they're talking about.

      FB has a business incentive to delete as little as they can: it keeps the user base engaged. Content, content, more content always. Enragement is engagement. They don't care what you post. They don't even really care about advertiser boycotts; boycotts have never hurt them. Last time they tried it, FB had a record quarter. Add to that, human moderators cost money. When they inevitably quit, they go on the news to talk about how Facebook gave them PTSD. Hiring moderators is a losing proposition.

      They have to pretend they care what you post, and pantomime with a few deletions here and there, because it's good PR. "See, we're doing something!" And if you believe they care about what you post, you have bought into it.

    • They're too busy taking down pro-Trump COVID posts, southern border crisis posts, and anything that paints China in a bad light.

      Care to show us your numbers? I'm willing to bet if you engaged one of your two brain cells you'll see they are doing fuck all of that as well.

  • antisemitic smokescreen (Score:5, Informative)

    by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @01:06PM (#61651543)

    Criticizing Israel or calling for boycott for human rights violations gets labelled as "antisemetism"

    That's wrong.

    • THIS. It is infuriating that you can't say anything - and that's why that argument is used. I think it's very disingenuous. The way to break that argument is to point out that it is not OK when *anyone* does it.

    • Re:antisemitic smokescreen (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ewibble ( 1655195 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @01:46PM (#61651827)

      Or pointing out Palestinians are sending rockets at Israel is racist. Both are wrong Israel is definitely abusing human rights, and vice versa.

      The problem I see is all sides are so quick label the other as racist, sexist, woke, naive, whatever that we have stopped listening to each other and are just reverted to calling each other names. Once you assume the opposing side is evil or stupid, anything they say can be dismissed.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by iggymanz ( 596061 )

        Those rockets from Gaza were *in response* to two Israel atrocities committed in the West Bank, which is region that has disarmed yet still gets oppressed. Israel during its formation wiped out unarmed towns, and so continues to this day with oppression and occupation.

        So are Palestinians just supposed to continue to take abuse and murder from their oppressors and do nothing?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Ah, the old "but he hit me first so I can do what I want." argument. That' always works out in the end, doesn't it.
      • Rockets made from pipes and castor oil, vs. top of the line weapons from a top arms maker? Yeah, that's some real symmetry there. People who call this a war are as thick as can be. Like bill hicks said: in a war, there are *two* armies fighting. There's just one army here, and it's financed by an entirely different country, one that doesn't even give its citizens free health care!
        • If you don't want your ass handed to you by a black belt, don't throw a punch at his face. Remember what the Boston bomber used? A pressure cooker. That's right a simple cooking utensil.

          Rockets made from pipes and castor oil,

          Pretty sure the Kornet and Fajr missiles don't use castor oil.

    • Criticizing Israel or calling for boycott for human rights violations gets labelled as "antisemetism"

      That's wrong.

      To be fair I think you should have mentioned that the CCDH report doesn't contain any such examples (or if you believe that it does quote it).

      • I'm referring to the fact of suppression of support for human rights for Palestinians happens on facebook, twiiter, instagram under smoke screen of "antisemitism"

        Since I'm interested in the topic, being fully supportive of Bernie Sanders and other righteous Jews' view of the situation, I saw it happen, and investigative journalists have reported on it.

        https://www.cjr.org/the_media_... [cjr.org]

    • Re:antisemitic smokescreen (Score:4, Insightful)

      by larryjoe ( 135075 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @02:08PM (#61651969)

      Criticizing Israel or calling for boycott for human rights violations gets labelled as "antisemetism"

      That's wrong.

      This was my first gut-reaction question - whether political speech critical of Israel would be labeled as anti-Semitic. Looking at the actual report, the long list of anti-Semitic tropes doesn't include any political issues. It is really quite shocking how many tropes exist and how ridiculous they are.

    • Did you read the blurb at least?

      Let us see. Is Holocaust denial antisemitic? Check. Is blood libel antisemitic? Check. Are racist caricatures of Jews antisemitic? Check. And, yes, (neo)-Nazis are antisemites (that is by definition, see Mein Kampf).

      Does the blurb mention State of Israel or critics directed at State of Israel? No, it does not.

      Now, what is your problem?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      For me the alarm bells start ringing when the only prejudice they are interested is anti-semitism, but not racism or bigotry as a whole. That in of itself implies to me that they themselves are prejudiced.

      And yes, it's difficult to know what the truth is when those who oppose the illegal settlements literally are called terrorists. It sounds like a bad joke that when a company says they will stop selling ice cream in illegal settlements that the government then calls them terrorists. +1 to Ben and Jerrys, C

    • Because universally holding Israel to an endless series of double standards that aren't being applied to anyone one else on Earth is completely fair and right. It's not "antisemetism", it's just the same people who made CRT and woke culture playing word games to justify their obvious hypocrisy and bias. Claiming false antisemitism is their only counter argument.
    • Horseshit. The posts in TFA aren't merely critical of policy or trying to put forth political discourse. They traffic in vile stereotypes and worn-out tropes that are pure, objective hate speech. Take a look instead of posting knee-jerk nonsense like this.

    • Even more annoying, the working definition of antisemitism [holocaustremembrance.com] explicitly says "criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic".

      • Yes, but it also has this: "Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor."

        So a state expressly created for a group /defined by ethnicity/, and which has by law granted immigration rights based upon that ethnicity... is somehow not a racist endeavor? Because it sounds a lot like an ethno-state to me. Imagine if the US had an immigration policy saying that all white people can be automatically granted citizenship. H

  • Well, maybe it's not necessarily antisemitic (Score:4, Funny)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @01:07PM (#61651549)

    Saying that you want Zuckerberg to die a painful, slow death is not aimed at his religion.

    Only his person.

  • Because these days people conflate things like criticizing actions of the Israeli government with antisemitism. Calling Netanyahu one of the most corrupt politicians in Israeli history could be considered by some to be antisemitic even though it has nothing to do with the man's religion and/or ethnicity, but his actions as PM, which meet pretty much any objective definition of corruption.

    • Because these days people conflate things like criticizing actions of the Israeli government with antisemitism. Calling Netanyahu one of the most corrupt politicians in Israeli history could be considered by some to be antisemitic even though it has nothing to do with the man's religion and/or ethnicity, but his actions as PM, which meet pretty much any objective definition of corruption.

      They used the standards set by the companies themselves. Examples of posts that weren't removed are included in the report, to me they look nothing like what you've stated.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ET3D ( 1169851 )

      I usually expect people on Slashdot to not read the linked article, but to not read what's been posted here kind of takes the cake.

      I mean, surely "platforms failed to act on 80% of posts containing Holocaust denial, 74% of posts alleging the blood libel, 70% of racist caricatures of Jewish people and 70% of neo-Nazi posts" should give you a good idea of the kind of antisemitic content referred to.

  • Unlike most folks, I've spent a lot of time out of morbid curiosity watching how the anti-semitic groups communicate. The reason these Jewish groups are upset is because the anti-semites are very, very good at not only often staying within the rules but making devastating use of rhetoric right back at their enemies.

    The most powerful rhetorical attack that they've developed so far is the "Hello, fellow white people" meme format which does two things:

    1. Gets a ton of Jews on social media saying something like

    • The question "how is it that the same people are hated in 100 different countries and it's all one big conspiracy against them?" is an entirely legitimate thing to ask in good faith. I wouldn't phrase it quite that way and I realize it is even easier to abuse such a question asking in bad faith to advance a bigoted argument.
        There's a lot of world history and human nature to study and understand to answer it. And if you really want to know why and how it happened, you can learn a lot.

      • It's a bad question by intentionally misstating the position of the person it's directed to aka straw man. Antisemitism doesn't need a conspiracy to be a legitimate problem. Human nature will do well enough.

      • I decided to look up a list of times the Jews were banished from any given nation and a common reason for a sizable chunk of it seems to be heresy or blasphemy which was taken far more seriously in old times than it is now. Ironically in 1948, a decree in Egypt forbade anyone leaving the country without a permit, which kept the Egyptian Jews IN as the Egyptians escalated their violence against them.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Twinbee ( 767046 )
        I wonder if it's partly due to them being more successful financially, due to their higher average IQ, as well as basic tribal instincts that everyone has ("they look different than me!").

    • Dictators redirect the hatred against an external group, or a small domestic one that's not large enough to have power. They are why your life sucks!

      Jews, latinos immigrating, it's all good fodder for those who want power.

      This is literally psych, sociology, or anthropology 101.

    • Re:They're upset because the anti-semites are clev (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Jodka ( 520060 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @03:19PM (#61652311)

      "how is it that the same people are hated in 100 different countries and it's all one big conspiracy against them?"

      So the subtext there is that because belief in conspiracies is delusional there can be no global conspiracy against Jews but instead some flaw attributable to Jews themselves inciting a universal hatred of them.

      Well that is partially accurate; not all coincident social behavior is conspiracy. When your local Walmart is mobbed on Black Friday that is not a conspiracy. There was no secretly organized plot by Walmart customers to schedule shopping trips to the same store at the same time on that day. Really, customers saw the sales brochure and independently decided on the same course of action, getting there early for the low prices before the inventory ran out. So we are intended to be thinking that it is not some secretly organized global plot to hate Jews, but that people everywhere sized them up and independently recognized that something is wrong with them.

      Well, it is not a conspiracy, but the widespread hatred of Jews reveals universal weaknesses of human nature, not some flaw in Jews.

      First, the diasporas mean that Jews were outsiders everywhere, and people generally hate all outsiders. It is not unique to Jews. A few generations ago in the United States if a white Lutheran wanted to marry a white Catholic they had to elope and their families refused to speak to them ever again. Still in the 1990's sometimes a little girl would wander into the wrong neighborhood in Ireland and get beat to death by Catholic adults for being Protestant. Refuges referred to pejoratively as "oakies" arriving in California from the midwest during the dustbowl faced ridicule and discrimination. Same race, same language, same religion. But they were poor and they moved in so the locals hated them. Now imagine what happens when a bunch of middle easterners who look different, speak a different language, and have different customs and traditions move into Europe during the early middle ages.

      Second, many people despise the wealthy and Jews are now, on average, very wealthy. Their mean incomes are far higher even than predicted by their mean higher IQ. Why? Whatever the reason, all that wealth drives envy and incites anti-semitism.

      Wealth is not rationally a reason for disliking others. As one critic of anti-semitism put it: A meth dealer and Jewish banker move into your neighborhood. Which one of these people is the problem?

  • Ehh... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There are plenty of trolls and hateful people, but I think some have a knee-jerk reaction to many things being anti-semitic that simply aren't. Alex Berenson tweeted "Impfung macht frei" the other day and all sorts of people replied that they reported him for hate speech due to it being anti-sememitic holocaust denial. What he tweeted was truly in bad taste, but it's hard to square it with being holocaust denial, it was a dumb attempt at drawing a parallel between the promise of vaccines providing freedom

  • If they're using the ADL definitions... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @01:12PM (#61651593)

    Pretty much everything will count as anti-semitic.
    They're quite a "no fun allowed" organization that keeps being baited constantly by 4chan to define the silliest things as "anti-semitic"

  • A lot of posts that are critical of Israel's Rightwing government are labeled as anti-Semitic. No, I'm not defending actual anti-Semitic posts. But much in the same way that a lot of concerned people label Sex Work as Sex Trafficking, we have a blurring of the lines when it comes to the Israeli government's horrid, Right-wing decisions. Saying "You shouldn't be running an open air prison" isn't anti-Semitic. It is pro-human rights.

    • The problem is you didn't even skim the report.

  • The Nation of Islam has a page on Facebook with 93,000 followers and 36,000 likes on the page. The Hebrew Israelites have 12,000 followers and 12,000 page likes.

    Tell me again about the National Socialists spreading hate on Facebook.

    The far right is a boogey man. Clean your own house first. It's far dirtier.

    • Apparently, the FBI, the Whitehouse, & the US military are rather concerned about the rise of what they call militia extremism. You know, like the "tourists" who calmly & respectfully wandered around the Capitol earlier this year.

      You know the first thing I feel when I see an American flag?

      Afraid.

      • LOL, what a joke. A few thugs and a few hundred grandparents take a tour through the white house with 0 to no weapons and you snowflakes freak out and call it an insurrection by militants. What happened to riots being the language of the unheard and "it's just property"? Oh how the tides turn so quickly and at so little. The left is in the middle of their military purges.

        4 capital police have now suicided and nobody cares. USA is now 90% a banana republic joke country.

        Spare me your façade of fake feeli

        • FBI vs random bloke on /.? Mmm... Who do I think is a more credible source for information related to domestic terrorism in the USA?

          Apparently, the FBI have been very concerned about militia groups for years.

          Remember Waco, Texas? You know, those upstanding citizens "expressing" their right to privacy to the FBI & national guard with their stupid "search warrant" from some "judge." That's just the first one off the top of my head. There must be stats on how often this kind of thing happens somewhere; May

          • "Bloke". Exposes themselves as UK serf. You got a license to be commentating on the internet, mate? I love this change of topic. Anything to avoid talking about rampant anti-Semitism in the also rampant left-wing extremism.

            • Last time I heard, those militia groups were expressing some "controversial views" about Jewish people. If it were true, it'd be enough to make me convert to Judaism... all that incredible power!!!

  • If only words had meaning (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Considering Semitic people covers non-Jews and there are non-Semitic Jews, it's all just a bunch of "wahh don't criticize Israel or its supporters!" yelling.
    • Well, there are certain people in the USA who have a lot of guns & flags, & think camo is a primary colour. Apparently, they aren't too fond of Jewish people.
  • What's wrong with talking about math?

  • Of course they haven't... (Score:3)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @03:45PM (#61652417) Journal

    ...everyone loves Ben & Jerry's, duh.

  • This must be a bit awkward for the Zuckerbergs at family gatherings. Facebook's effectively popularising the rise of the 4th Reich. Do they ask him about it or do they just stare at him or do they pretend it isn't happening?

  • if antisemitism disappeared off the internet.. (Score:3)

    by BardBollocks ( 1231500 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @08:23PM (#61653593)

    .. what else would Israel use to smear people talking out about it's ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity behind?

    Facebook won't be fixed, because it's not broken. Working as intended.

  • They were too busy deplatforming anyone who isn't left-wing. Unfortunately, the jew haters are usually left-wing too.

  • Facebook needs to remove posts. 100% of all posts. That will guarantee that nothing bad is posted. Removaltarianism forever!

  • It used to be that I cared because we all knew what was actually racist, sexist or discriminatory towards religion. Now it's a nonsensical mishmash of whatever some random person thinks would be sensational to call bigotry and my standards have changed appropriately: I now care about none of it.

    The best example is Gina Gershon being called an antisemite. If that's the bar then I no longer care, at all. I won't even report clearly Nazi bullshit any more. Sorry, but I'm at a desensitization saturation at this

  • Re (Score:1)

    by Ultimer ( 8105522 )
    In fact, I think you need to stop hating each other a little and start learning to love. Take your time, sooner or later you will find a loved one because there are tons of nerd dating apps [datingadvicehelp.com] you can try. But for that to happen, you need to be willing to love everyone.

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