By Melissa Garlick | National Civil Rights Counsel May 22, 2018 Harvard Law & Policy Review Three militia members from southwest Kansas were recently convicted on federal civil rights charges and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction for targeting Somali Muslim immigrants for a plan of mass murder in 2016. On a recording made available to the jury, one of the defendants said: “The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.” The convictions sent an important message of…
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May 18, 2018 By Oren Segal | Director of the Center on Extremism
Supporters of Patrick Little’s campaign for Dianne Feinstein’s U.S. Senate seat have taken up a disturbing new tactic: virulently anti-Semitic robocalls.
Little, an unabashed anti-Semite and racist who attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, is polling at around 18%, well behind Feinstein in California’s party-blind June 5th…
ADL's Center for Technology and Society's new and innovative work to fight hate and bias in games and emerging media.
New York, NY, May 16, 2018 … The Anti-Defamation League released a statement today after Twitter shared the results of a new approach it has taken since March to reduce the amount of abuse on the platform.
The following is a statement from Brittan Heller, Director of ADL’s Center for Technology and Society:
“Twitter's new approach to disruptive and harassing tweets is a promising and important step in addressing hate online. It is especially so in terms of how it…
Washington, D.C., May 11, 2018 ... In testimony before the US Commission on Civil Rights today, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) outlined the urgent need to improve hate crime prevention, training, and response, highlighting a series of specific recommendations to improve hate crime reporting and advance police-community relations. The ADL statement, which was presented by Melissa Garlick, ADL National Civil Rights Counsel, also discussed the current climate of incivility and…
By Brittan Heller | Director for Technology and Society May 02, 2018 WIRED When he testified before Congress last month, FacebookCEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed the problem of using artificial intelligence to identify online hate speech. He said he was optimistic that in five to 10 years, “We will have AI tools that can get into some of the linguistic nuances of different types of content to be more accurate in flagging content for our systems, but today we&rsquo…
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…
by: Jonathan Greenblatt | February 05, 2018 USA Today The cold-blooded murder of Blaze Bernstein has horrified the Jewish community and indeed all Americans. It is hard to come to terms with the shocking brutality that ended the life of such a bright and promising young man. At just 19, Blaze already had shown an aptitude for writing and the arts, even while excelling in a rigorous molecular sciences program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Blaze will always be remembered for the…
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.
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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…
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…
Washington, DC, June 28, 2017…The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) will join with representatives of America’s leading civil rights and religious organizations on Thursday to present at the Justice Department’s Hate Crimes Subcommittee Summit, where Attorney General Jeff Sessions will address participants.
ADL’s experts will participate in workshops and roundtables and offer a series of recommendations and strategies on how to improve hate crime training, reporting,…
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…