|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
By United with Israel Staff
Facebook is no stranger to controversy, permitting Jew-hatred to fester and giving a free pass to anti-Israel lies and antisemitic propaganda.
The social media giant is now in hot water due to the technology it uses to promote content, which a watchdog group called the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) says automatically creates home pages for U.S.-designated terror groups.
Among the TTP report’s bombshell findings is evidence alleging that Facebook created over 100 pages for ISIS (Islamic State), as well as pages for other terror organizations, including the group behind the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., Al-Qaeda.
TTP reported that Facebook creates the pages based on its algorithm, automatically generating them when users add the terror groups to their profiles. The platform’s so-called ban on the groups apparently did little to prevent the automatic process that generated the terror group pages.
“Some of these automatically generated pages have been living on Facebook for years, racking up likes and posts with terrorist propaganda and imagery,” reported the Jerusalem Post in its coverage of the TTP’s findings. “The company could potentially be held responsible for these pages as Facebook not just hosting but actually creating them.”
This is only the latest chapter in Facebook’s struggles to keep hate off its platform.
Over the last several years, Facebook has been a hotbed for anti-Israel lies and antisemitic propaganda.
At the end of 2022, a post with tens of thousands of likes on Facebook claimed that the Palestinians aren’t playing in the World Cup because Israel is “murdering” their players. The claim was demonstrably false and had zero basis in reality.
In 2021, well-known Jewish Canadian professor Gad Saad of Concordia University in Montreal was banned by Facebook for criticizing a tweet with a quote attributed to Hitler justifying his genocidal obsession with the Jews.
“This is where we are at with Facebook. It is becoming intolerable. Imagine that a Jewish person cannot criticize a Pakistani actress who has endorsed the actions of Adolf Hitler. It is beyond Orwellian. It is a refutation of sense making, reason, and common decency,” tweeted Professor Saad.
On May 11, 2021, Veena Malik, a well-known a Pakistani celebrity, tweeted: “‘I would have killed all the Jews of the world … but I kept some to show the world why I killed them,’ Adolph Hitler.”
That post, which was part of a series of pro-Palestinian comments on the Israel-Gaza conflict, was retweeted over 700 times, quoted over 2,600 times and liked over 2,500 times, but after Saad posted on Facebook a photo of his retweet of Malik’s Twitter post with the caption “I see this every day. Every day,” Facebook banned the post and blocked Saad’s account.
“Even though Facebook has banned me on several prior occasions (for sharing posts CRITICIZING hatred and bigotry), and they’ve recognized their error on occasion, they still hold those false strikes against me. In other words, you are never absolved if you are innocent. Unreal,” Saad said.
“I’m a Lebanese Jew who escaped religious persecution in the Middle East. I fight against all bigotry, but I know firsthand about Jew-hatred having lived in the Middle East,” Saad added.
Saad said he got a standard form e-mail from Facebook saying: “You recently posted something that violates Facebook policies, so you’re temporarily blocked.”
