New York, NY, April 20, 2018 ... The following is a statement from Brittan Heller, director of ADL’s Center for Technology and Society, in response to a CNN report that found retail brands’ advertising running on YouTube channels promoting white nationalists, Nazis, pedophiles and other extremist views.
It's unfortunate but not surprising to see this type of hateful content appear in this way on YouTube. This is an ongoing problem with the lack of understanding in terms of…
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January 17, 2018 Updated: July 16, 2019 It has become commonplace to witness a public display of bigoted and offensive language. In a tweet, President Trump remarked that four U.S. Congresswomen of color (Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley and Tlaib) should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” The language of "go back to where you came from" is widely recognized as a racist slur, and in particular this one is also…
January 10, 2018 By Brittan Heller | Director of the Center for Technology and Society & Aaron Sussman | Associate National Civil Rights Counsel
It was a hoax turned deadly. On the evening of December 28, a distressed-sounding man called the police in Wichita, Kansas, and confessed that he had shot his father in the head, was holding his mother and sibling hostage, and had poured gasoline in the house, threatening to set it on fire. He then gave the police his address.
…
January 05, 2018 The Arizona Republic By Carlos Galindo-Elvira | Arizona Regional Director
What does Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy mean to us in these challenging times?
Dr. King exposed the brutality of discriminatory laws and institutionalized racism. He served a greater good. His purpose was to remove the burden of oppression. He reminded us about the importance of "content of character."
As we head toward another day of remembering Dr. King, his own…
December 19, 2017 Following Monday's implementation of new safety rules on Twitter, a number of users associated with white supremacy and other hateful ideologies found themselves no longer allowed on the platform.
"ADL commends Twitter for taking these significant steps to tackle hate on their platform. We long urged Twitter to push back against hateful and violent rhetoric, and these latest actions are encouraging," CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. …
December 08, 2017 All online platforms with user-generated content struggle with how best to moderate that content.The stakes are especially high when the platform is exclusively aimed at young children.
This is something YouTube, whose parent company Google is part of ADL’s Problem-Solving Lab, learned in a particularly disturbing way, as the young viewers of its popular YouTube Kids app were suddenly exposed to videos of their favorite characters suffering grisly deaths,…
November 27, 2017 By Mark Pitcavage, Senior Research Fellow for the Center on Extremism
Many subjects are difficult to report on, but extremist and fringe movements are particularly difficult landscapes for journalists to navigate, strewn with rough terrain and the occasional landmine. As someone who has monitored right-wing extremism for more than two decades, I’ve had the pleasure of reading many fine works of journalism on extremist-related subjects, but I’ve also seen…
Remarks by Jonathan A. Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League November 13, 2017 San Francisco, CA, November 13, 2017
Good morning everyone. Thank you for being here. I am grateful that you have all joined us this morning.
At the ADL, we’ve been fighting the scourge of anti-Semitism for more than 100 years. But until last year, we hadn’t created an open venue for dialogue about the issue, and so we launched the Never Is Now! conference last November. And as it…
Dozens of games developed in 1st ADL game jam hosted by Center on Technology and Society New York, November 8, 2017 … The Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Technology and Society today announced the winners of the organization’s first game jam, a competitive hackathon held last month with the goal of developing games that can help change attitudes and reduce bias, especially among youth.
The top award went to a team from Austin, Texas, that created a game called &ldquo…
For parents, families and young people Topic SummaryIn recent years, there has been a lot of attention paid to the diversity of children’s books, shining a light on the lack of diversity and amplifying the need for more children’s and young adult literature that reflects our multicultural society. In 2014, an organization named We Need Diverse Books formed, following a regularly trending hashtag with the same name (#WeNeedDiverseBooks) that helped bring attention to the issue. We…
October 20, 2017 Recently, a video game designer was working on a multiplayer first-person shooter game at a small studio. Others in the company were building battle maps, weapons, and different avatars — but she was the only person to raise her hand and say, "What are we doing to make sure that folks who are playing this game online aren't being totally awful to each other?"
She decided to create community guidelines, looking at lists of hateful words to determine which words could…
ADL to Co-Host ‘Being an Ally Game Jam’ in Multiple Cities Across U.S. NEW YORK – October 16, 2017 … With America as divided as ever and more people being targeted by bias, bullying and hatred online and off-line, the Anti-Defamation League and The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment are hosting a hackathon where video game developers will work together to explore what it means to be an ally and build video games that help counter the hate and bias we’ve seen…
August 29, 2017 Adults and children alike are grappling to make sense of current events. Discussions of racism, anti-Semitism and social injustice have become increasingly contentious as images of white supremacists carrying torches and chanting hateful rhetoric in Charlottesville fill our social media feeds and television screens. Children are attuned to these conversations and disturbing images of violence, hate and incivility, and are seeking comfort and answers from teachers, family…
August 29, 2017 In response to the recent events in Charlottesville, Facing History and Ourselves, Teaching Tolerance, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Federation of Teachers, and EduColor teamed up to support educators as they return to the classroom. Hosted and led by AFT, we asked educators what topics they were most concerned about and addressed them in a co-hosted webinar, “When Hate Is in the Headlines: Resources for K–12 Educators.” Together, we offered…
August 16, 2017 At the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, anti-Semitism was on full display. White supremacists marched through the streets shouting obscenities at crowds of protesters where they spewed Nazi slogans, anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic phrases. The chaos surrounding the event was significant for a number of reasons, even beyond the violence and hatred on display. Rally organizers convinced hundreds of white supremacists to overlook their ideological…
August 13, 2017 Racial hatred, bias and white supremacy were on full display in Charlottesville, Virginia this weekend.
In the largest and most violent gathering of white supremacists in decades, “Unite the Right” brought together white supremacist groups including the alt-right, neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. Their stated goal was to save the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, because like other places in the South, there are still monuments there celebrating heroes…
May 01, 2017 Updated: 9/5/18 Has the simple thumb-and-forefinger “OK” hand gesture become a common white supremacist hand sign? Not quite, but it has become a popular gesture used by people across several segments of the right and far right—including some actual white supremacists—who generally use it to trigger reactions, or what they would describe as “trolling the libs.” This is thanks to a 2017 hoax campaign started by members of the…
April 10, 2017 An online campaign of anti-Semitism has been directed at Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and advisor over the past week. It comes in the context of Trump’s removal of chief strategist Stephen Bannon from the National Security Council and reports about a feud between Bannon and Kushner as well as airstrikes in Syria in response to the chemical attack last week.
This campaign of anti-Semitism has been driven by white supremacists and anti-Semites…
March 31, 2017 The Forward By Brittan Heller
Director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Technology and Society
For years, the Anti-Defamation League has held the clear, unwavering stance that videos made by terrorists and hate groups have no place on the internet. Hate-filled videos mislead children, poison the online experience for everyone, and serve as an unfortunate, yet effective, tool to recruit new generations of violent extremists.
Now, ADL is seeing the impact…
March 21, 2017 The irony was thick this week when a Massachusetts rabbi wrote a blog piece musing about the dangerous effects of online trolling, citing the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer as a prime perpetrator. A Daily Stormer writer immediately pounced, posting a story ridiculing the rabbi’s concern and encouraging readers to, yes, troll her via Twitter (he provided the rabbi’s handle) “to thank her for spreading degeneracy among the Jews, or for helping spread our fame…