Facebook is being pressured to tag criticism of Israel automatically as “anti-Semitism.”
The objective is to force Facebook to alter its hate speech definition so that its own “detection algorithm” will characterize any criticism of Israel as hate speech and automatically remove the pertinent content from the platform.
The change Facebook recently made, which recognizes the claiming that Jews secretly rule the world as anti-Semitism, is correct. That conspiracy theory is antisemitic, however, it is not criticism of Israel’s occupation and colonization of Palestine.
ACT.IL established an army of trolls and then developed an app whose role is to render the trolls’ work more effective. The idea behind the app, Act.IL’s founder Yarden Ben-Yosef explained, was simple:
“Companies, such as Facebook, remove content following reports from the community. If there is only one person reporting it, he usually gets told by Facebook the content doesn’t meet the criteria for removal. If 300 report it—the content is removed immediately. As soon as content inciting against Israel is posted online, we send a message through the app and all of its subscribers immediately report it.”
While the establishment of a trolling army to stifle criticism of Israel might already seem pernicious, a slew of right-wing Zionist organizations have recently come up with an even more pernicious strategy, and, if successful, all content critical of Israel will be removed from Facebook and other social media platforms without the intervention of a single troll.