The following letter was submitted to the New York Post in response to "Forget using PayPal if your views run afoul of this left-wing group” (July 29) To the Editor:
Jonathan S. Tobin’s mischaracterization of ADL and PayPal’s partnership as an attempt to censor conservative voices is disingenuous and without any evidence (“Forget using PayPal if your views run afoul of this left-wing group,” July 29).
In truth, our partnership with PayPal will…
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August 06, 2021 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
ADL and Hillel International announced they are working together to play a stronger role in fighting antisemitism on campus. Antisemitic content is proving to be a persistent problem across social media as major platforms fail to protect Jewish targets, according to a new report that gives Facebook and many others low grades. ADL criticized remarks from US Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) as a problematic “dog whistle” when she alleged…
July 29, 2021 THE WEEK’S BIG 3PayPal is partnering with ADL to investigate how extremist and hate movements in the U.S. take advantage of financial platforms to fund their criminal activities. A swastika was found carved into an elevator at the State Department, prompting President Biden to speak out. Unilever’s CEO wrote a letter to ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt in which they made clear the company will continue to do business in Israel despite its subsidiary Ben & Jerry’s…
June 30, 2021 This blog post is the second in a series of three articles that will explore the unique challenges audio content moderation poses for platforms creating audio-focused digital spaces. The first article in this series focused on the choices around recording audio for the purpose of content moderation in audio only digital social spaces. This article will discuss how platforms can choose to review audio for content moderation. The third article will cover cautionary tales from…
May 13, 2021 This blog post is the first in a series of three articles that will explore the unique challenges audio content moderation poses for platforms creating audio-focused digital spaces. This first article focuses on the choices around recording audio, and includes recommendations regarding Clubhouse’s current practices around recording. The second will discuss reviewing audio. The third will be on current approaches and models of audio content moderation that have been publicly…
May 07, 2021 By David Andrew Weinberg
On the last Friday of Ramadan every year, the Government of Iran organizes what it calls Global Quds (i.e. Jerusalem) Day, which it uses as an opportunity to spread horrific propaganda calling for the destruction of the State of Israel, as well as messages of support for terrorist organizations and a deluge of antisemitic hate speech.
This year was no exception. On Friday, May 7, the main English-language Twitter account attributed to Iran…
May 07, 2021 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
Four months after his ouster from Facebook and Instagram, the suspension of former president Donald Trump was upheld by the Facebook Oversight Board. A former leader in a violent neo-Nazi group was sentenced Tuesday to 41 months in prison for harassing journalists who reported on his activities and others. Police arrested a 29-year-old man on hate crime charges in connection with the vandalization of several Bronx synagogues, which included the…
April 30, 2021 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
ADL counted 196 cases of antisemitic “Zoombombing” attacks in the U.S. last year, including 114 against Jewish institutions, according to its annual report released this week. Three Georgia men were indicted on federal hate crime charges in connection with the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was shot to death while jogging through a South Georgia neighborhood last year. Authorities in New York City are looking for the…
Calif. legislation would require social media companies to publicly disclose corporate policies and key data and metrics on enforcement New York, NY, March 30, 2021...ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) welcomed the introduction of legislation from California State Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel that would require social media platforms to publicly disclose their content moderation policies regarding online hate/racism, disinformation, extremism, harassment and foreign interference, as well as key…
March 19, 2021 By David Andrew Weinberg
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is the Supreme Leader of Iran and an active presence on various social media platforms in multiple languages. And although he uses these accounts to spread hatred, violence, and dangerous disinformation – let alone his calls to destroy the State of Israel – these platforms allow him to keep doing so in seeming violation of their own policies.
This is in purported deference to his status as a political…
February 22, 2021 Social media platforms have received the lion’s share of attention for enabling users to spread hate and disinformation and plan and incite violence and terrorist acts. Flying under the radar are infrastructure providers like Epik, a domain registrar and web hosting company that works with nearly 750,000 websites and is ranked among the 50 largest web hosts. A domain is the address of a website you type into the URL bar of an internet browser. Domain registrars are…
February 12, 2021 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
Google's YouTube is still recommending extremist and white supremacist videos to viewers already susceptible to racial hatred, a new report from ADL found. Iranian schools are teaching antisemitism, hatred and conspiratorial material in their textbooks, according to a comprehensive analysis by ADL. Police in Spokane, WA are looking for the person who painted swastikas on the Temple Beth Shalom building and a Holocaust memorial.
Read on for more…
New York, NY, February 5, 2021 … ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) issued the following statement in response to the introduction of the “Safeguarding Against Fraud, Exploitation, Threats, Extremism, and Consumer Harms Act” or the SAFE TECH Act from Senators Mark Warner (D-VA), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and which proposes reforms to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that would directly address tech platform involvement in discrimination,…
January 15, 2021 We live more and more in digital spaces, so we have to work harder to distinguish protected online speech from unprotected online conduct. In the wake of the attack at the U.S. Capitol on January 6—an attack that was planned, mobilized and livestreamed online—this work has gained an even greater sense of urgency, especially when it comes to doxing.
Many people define doxing as posting someone’s personal information online. But doxing as a blanket…
January 15, 2021 A livestream video shot by a newly-elected West Virginia lawmaker shows a disturbing gap between what a mob of Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol thought about the events of January 6 and what the rest of the world actually saw.
Derrick Evans, a freshman member of the West Virginia House of Delegates, viewed fellow rioters swarming around him and forcing entry into the Capitol as a celebration. He was visibly giddy. But for horror-struck viewers, it was a violent…
January 13, 2021 The January 6 attack at our nation’s Capitol was deliberate and coordinated. Individuals who broke the law must be held accountable, but we cannot ignore that social media platforms, like Gab, may well bear a measure of criminal responsibility for the attack as well. To the extent Gab intentionally served as a forum for people to plan, coordinate, engage in or otherwise facilitate the criminal activity that took place on January 6, a Department of Justice investigation…
December 11, 2020 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
The only Anne Frank memorial in the United States was vandalized Tuesday, a distressing display of hate that has prompted a police investigation. A report into last year's Christchurch mosque attack found that New Zealand security agencies were "almost exclusively" focused on the threat from Islamist terrorism, and police failed to enforce proper checks on firearm licenses. Facebook is embarking on a major overhaul of its algorithms that detect hate…
November 24, 2020 UPDATE:
In July 2021, during a investigative radio show and podcast, Alex Mann, an Australian journalist for ABC’s Background Briefing, identified CatboyKami (aka Philip Hedley) as Tor Gustafsson Brookes.
Extremists are constantly adapting and finding ways to reach new audiences, spread and spew their hate and create online content. Their latest tactic involves the use of Omegle, a free online chat service that randomly pairs anonymous users for…
November 20, 2020 The latest Facebook Transparency Report, which covers July 2020 to September 2020 (Q3 2020), raises some alarming concerns around the prevalence of hate speech on the platform, leaving ADL with several questions that demand clear answers. ADL published a blog post about the opaque nature of Facebook’s transparency reports in January 2019. Many of the same problems that existed in the 2019 reports continue in Facebook’s most recent transparency efforts.
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November 17, 2020 Facebook has been vocal about its recent efforts to suspend and ban hateful, conspiratorial and violent content from its platform. And yet a great deal of extremist content remains.
As of November 16, 2020, even a cursory search of Facebook brings up white supremacist, racist and antisemitic pages. The following is a sampling of extremist groups and individuals currently active on Facebook.
Antisemites and Holocaust Deniers:
TruNews is a fundamentalist…