Unless people are inciting violence or organizing systematic discrimination, I think people should be free to say whatever they want. I understand why some people want to ban such speech, and there will always be those people, and there will always be ignorance and bigotry. It’s a slippery slope to give a subset of people control over what is allowed to be said. Maybe someone will point out my ignorance, too.
I'm a Jew, a Zionist, and a knee-jerk supporter of Israel. That makes me the type of person many of these posts are hating on. But I don't think that they should be taken down. I would rather that the hatred of me and my tribe remain public and visible, so that we can see it and respond appropriately. Hiding it does not remove the sentiment or the danger. Words spoken against such hate, convincing people that it is not justified, are triggered by such posts too, yet those are also suppressed when the hate message is suppressed.<p>I want to know who hates me and why. Protecting me from that endangers me more.
As a reminder, hate speech is not against the law in the United States [1].<p>However, it is against the law in plenty of other countries, and likely against the TOS of most sites.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/07/no-theres-no-hate-speech-exception-to-the-first-amendment/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...</a>
This is sad because they were apparently better at taking down non anti-semitic pro-palestinian posts. <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/israel-palestinians-socialmedia-idUSL8N2MU624" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/article/israel-palestinians-socialme...</a>
A common argument is that allegations of anti-semitism are used to shut down criticism of Israel. That's clearly true. It's also true that a lot of the criticism of Israel is based on anti-semitism. Good luck sorting that out with internet censorship!
Is it even tenable to build an app or product centered around a social feed anymore? Manual moderation is cost prohibitive and does not scale. Algorithmic moderation gives some hope but there is a certain dystopian future that seems unavoidable in that direction.<p>How would I go about building an accessible social feed that cannot be censored? Is there any country and/or technology in the world that is viable now and in the long term?
Does this include all the legitimate criticisms of Israel that people try to lazily deflect with accusations of antisemitism? Who is doing the counting?
Frankly when us Jews call out anti-Semitism, the whole room stands up to tell us what is and is not anti-Semitism. Imagine doing that to LGBT folks or other minorities. I'm not even much of an Israel supporter but it is exhausting to hear a bunch of white progressives who have never set foot in the Middle East tell me I am wrong about the criticism I hear.<p>Recently, folks at Rutgers have been criticizing Campus Hillel as a Zionist organization. The place where your average secular Jewish college students gets Challah bread once a semester. Yet saying "that is anti-semitic" invites a whole bunch of people to whitesplain to you why it isn't.
I think if you take down these sorts of posts you may create a Streisand effect where it actually makes the problem worse.<p>In general though I don't think social media platforms should be taking down content that does not violate the law or that the law should be expanded to cover "hate speech." In the USA at least free speech has worked pretty well so far.
It's pretty... interesting, that the new expected norm is that all hateful / offensive posts are taken down on the internet. 10 years ago, this would be a very confusing headline to read.
>It said they included Holocaust denial, and conspiracy theories with false claims about Jews "controlling" governments and banks, or orchestrating world events.<p>-<p>>It said that those it tagged as Holocaust denial remained online 80% of the time, while for neo-Nazi content it was 71%.<p>I'm glad to see they were somewhat specific on the content. On the internet things get muddy and I've been on a forum that was tied to a specific location that was connected to an American politician. For a short while we were inundated with some new accounts there arriving to tell us how outraged they were about this antisemitic politician who as far as I could tell had just criticized Israeli government actions / policies.<p>It's unfortunate that my first thought was "What what are we talking about exactly here?"
Jew here,<p>Being Jewish != supporting Israel. I have never been to Israel, I do not identify as Israeli, nor do I support Israel. I fully support a free and independent Palestinian state and believe Israel is commiting genocide. Only 30% of Jews live in Israel and the rest are scattered across the world. Much of the Antisemitism discussed in this article is occuring in America and across Europe. I challenge everyone to seperate these two issues, as public apathy is what fuels further attacks by extremists online and in real life.
It's really weird that people think it's the responsibility of these platforms to police their users. Those of you that think it's easy to do, you're very very wrong. Censorship is also a problem and we should be supporting the right of idiots to voice their stupid thoughts so that we have the opportunity to voice our thoughts when others would rather not hear them. That's the whole point of freedom of speech.
Anti semitism is unique amongst other forms of racism in that there’s generally little or no action taken, even for blatant displays: <a href="https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdbHft64/" rel="nofollow">https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdbHft64/</a>
I'm skeptical of this kind of analysis without concrete examples of the kind of content that wasn't removed. Even if you trust the researchers (I personally am not familiar with them), there are legitimate reasons why they might not categorize things the same way as social media platforms.<p>e: Turns out that the researchers' full report actually does contain concrete examples, which seem to be legitimately bad and take-down-able.
Actual source: [0]<p>Also from [0]<p>> Our researchers reported hundreds of racist anti-Jewish posts to social media firms using their user reporting tools. 84% were not acted upon.<p>The same social media cartel still housing 'hate' on their platforms with 84% of anti-semitism posts still on their sites! That's not good enough. Even Khomeini is still there violating the 'sloppy Twitter guidelines'.<p>Do better.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.counterhate.com/failuretoprotect" rel="nofollow">https://www.counterhate.com/failuretoprotect</a>