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…
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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 On February 5, 2021, the FBI arrested Christian Michael Mackey, an alleged member of neo-Nazi group Iron Youth, on charges of an unlawful sale of a firearm. Mackey allegedly attempted to sell his gun to someone identified to him as a known felon, but Mackey seemed primarily concerned that the buyer was “based”— which in this case means that he subscribes to white supremacist beliefs.
According to the affidavit, Mackey allegedly incited others in an…
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 As images of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol have been shared across social media, activists in the broader anti-Israel movement used photos that showed the appearance of an incongruous Israeli flag among pro-Trump protestors at the rally and outside the Capitol to falsely link Zionism and Israel with the extremism of January 6.
According to photos and reports, other national…
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…
January 08, 2021 On Wednesday, January 6, 2021, pro-Trump extremists, including some identified right-wing extremists, stormed the U.S. Capitol building, interrupting the Congressional session affirming the election results and forcing a partial evacuation. The nation and the world watched the chaos unfold, including scenes of the mob on the Senate floor, in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, and swarming the Capitol steps. By the time the siege ended, four people were dead: three from…
January 07, 2021 The invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 by pro-Trump extremists forced a suspension of the Joint Session of Congress certifying the results of the 2020 election and necessitated the evacuation of elected officials and staff.
Security preparations for the certification were likely developed and implemented with the knowledge that state capitols have been a frequent target of extremists throughout 2020. Why these preparations failed so dramatically…
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…
Remarks by Jonathan A. Greenblatt, ADL CEO November 09, 2020 Thank you all for tuning in today for the 5th annual Never is Now conference. There is so much to discuss, but before we get started, I want to pause and remember Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks who left us too soon this weekend. He was an extraordinary leader, a remarkable rabbi, a gifted scholar and a beautiful man. He will be missed. May his memory always be for a blessing. We gather today -- virtually -- at what feels like the start…
November 05, 2020 A subset of high-profile, misinformation-laden posts reached a combined potential audience of more than 108M followers, with over 1.1M likes and retweets prior to ADL reporting them to Twitter on November 4, 2020. From the time ADL reported the tweets to Twitter on November 4 until our final check on November 9, we found that the misleading tweets that remained unaddressed by the social media platform had been liked or retweeted more than 297,000 additional times. Tweets…
October 16, 2020 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
After years of urging from ADL and other civil rights organizations, Facebook will ban posts that deny the Holocaust. A video has gone viral on social media of a man shouting at a Hasidic Jewish man for not wearing a mask on an empty New York City street. YouTube on Thursday became the latest social media giant to take steps to stop QAnon, the sprawling right-wing conspiracy theory community whose online fantasies about a cabal of satanic pedophiles…
October 15, 2020 Nearly half of American adults experience online harassment and nearly one third experience severe harassment, but society still struggles with understanding the deep impact of online hate. Too often, we see “online hate” contrasted with “real world violence.” Trust us: to victims and targets of swatting, doxing, cyberstalking, and cyberharassment, the abuse they experience online is very real.
We know that digital abuse pushes targets offline…