Tuesday, January 05, 2016

Exposing Facebook Bias Against Israel

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, leader of Shurat HaDin


The Facebook experiment: Do all lives matter?
Wow. Do some lives matter more to Facebook than others? Sounds incredible. Watch the video before you answer. This experiment by the amazing people at Shurat HaDin - Israel Law Center needs to be seen by everyone. Share and keep on sharing.
Posted by The Israel Project on Monday, January 4, 2016

Is Facebook biased against Israel? - Coral Braun

With the proliferation of anti-Israel Facebook pages and trending twitter hashtags, cyber jihad has grown to be all too familiar and difficult to control. As jihad accounts are removed from respective networks, new ones are immediately launched in their place, brewing the anti-Israel sentiment that serves as a catalyst for the violence carried out by the young jihadis behind Israel's latest terror wave.

Shurat HaDin, an Israeli based civil rights organization, set out in late December to test whether Facebook holds double standards when it comes to incitement. The NGO launched "The Big Facebook Experiment," which sought to expose the reality of anti-Israel sentiment vis-a-vis the simultaneous launch of two Facebook pages: "Stop Palestinians" and "Stop Israel."

Following the launch of the two nearly-identical pages on December 29, the NGO posted hateful content simultaneously on both pages over the course of the next few days.


The next step in Shurat HaDin's experiment was to report both faux-incitement pages to Facebook to see which, if either, would be removed under the auspices of hateful content.

Despite featuring identical content, however, only one was removed from the online platform.

The page inciting against Palestinians was closed by Facebook (on the same day that it was reported) for "containing credible threat of violence" which "violated our [Facebook's] community standards." The page inciting against Israelis, however, was not shut down, despite its identical hateful content. Facebook claimed that this page was "not in violation of Facebook's rules." Shurat HaDin's staged anti-Israel group "Stop Israel" still remains active on Facebook.


"The Big Facebook Experiment" backs an unprecedented lawsuit which was filed in October by Shurat HaDin law center against Facebook on behalf of 20,000 Israelis to stop allowing Palestinian terrorists to incite violent attacks against Israeli citizens on the social network's platform.

Shurat HaDin argued that Facebook acts as a non-neutral platform and cannot be considered a mere "publisher of speech" since its complex algorithms connect terrorists to inciters and would-be jihadis.

"Calling on people to commit crimes is not constitutionally protected speech and endangers the lives of Jews and Israelis," Shurat HaDin said in its claim.
[Jerusalem Post]
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2 comments:

John Mac said...

I know someone who works for FB. Their standards are coloured by who exactly moderates and the political shade of the moderator. Hipster liberal types make up a large percentage of the workforce, although this might be strenuously denied.

Bruce said...

Interesting. Scary that hipsters are monitoring Facebook content in a complex world.
Bruce