"No Israel=No War" & Other Judeophobic Filth: The Ugly Side Of Facebook

"No Israel=No War" & Other Judeophobic Filth: The Ugly Side Of Facebook

The Australia-based Online Hate Prevention Institute (OHPI), founded this year and headed by Dr Andre Oboler, has drawn Facebook's attention to a number of loathsome Jew-hating images posted by users on the site, images which for some unfathomable reason Facebook denies are antisemitic, and consequently allows:

 "OHPI recently reported a number of antisemitic images to Facebook using the regular reporting facility available to all users. Every one of our reports was swiftly reviewed and swiftly rejected.

Facebook is making a serious effort to respond faster to complaints, but this is meaningless if the response is to invariably reject the complaints. There is also no appeal and we have no details of any internal review process – if there is one, Facebook is welcome to share details to reassure us."

These reported images fall into several categories identified by the OHPI:

Mocking victims of the Holocaust ("Whats that burning? Oh it's my family" is superimposed upon a photograph of a smiling Anne Frank);

Promoting blood libel ("No Israel=No War" appears below two other lines, one in Arabic, on an image of a baby awaiting its turn to go through a meat grinder embossed with a Magen David and made into mince); Denying Jews human rights; and Holocaust denial.

Observes the OHPI:

"There is no way of knowing what is going on at Facebook, but three possibilities suggest themselves: (1) Facebook is giving control of the review process to a group of died in the wool racists, (2) Facebook review staff are well intentioned but seriously ignorant about hate speech, (3) Facebook as policy is doing everything it can in order to normalise the presence of hate speech on its platform. Either the recruitment process is serious[ly] flawed, or the training provided to staff is seriously inadequate, or something is rotten at the core of Facebook.

OHPI believes that these examples are exceedingly clear demonstrations of racism. We call on Facebook to:

1. Remove the offensive images

2. Close the offensive pages they are posting them

3. Permanently close the accounts of the users abusing Facebook to spread such hate

4. Review which staff assessed these examples and audit their decision making

5. Take active measures to improve staff training to avoid similar poor decisions in the future

6. To institute an appeal process as part of the online reporting system

7. To institute systematic random checks of rejected complaints
 
 .... The concern here is not simply that this content was on the Facebook platform, but that Facebook staff were not able to identify this as hate even after it had been reported to them."

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