Israel Matzav

Facebook: Institutional racism?

In an earlier post, I discussed the anti-Semitism at Facebook which is reflected by the fact that so many anti-Semitic pages are allowed to remain online. The Online Hate Prevention Institute's Andre Oboler writes that it almost seems like Facebook is doing it intentionally.

Each of these examples was reported to Facebook, and each of these complaints was resolved with the decision “Not Removed”. The system has no appeal process.

These revelations take the problem from one of an inability to quickly control user generated content, to a problem of institutional antisemitism. A UK inquiry described institutional racism as: “The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.” Whether through active prejudice or simply ignorance, the failure of Facebook staff to correctly assess antisemitic content discriminates against Jewish people.

We are not alone. Facebook has also recently been in an extended dispute with Australian human rights authorities and government regulators over racist content targeting Australian Indigenous people. Regulators went as far as classifying the content to makes its distribution in Australia illegal, and Facebook eventually blocked the content, but only to users in Australia.

The trend the Online Hate Prevention Institute is seeing is for Facebook to deny individual items of content are racists, take pages offline to review them, and then offer the administrator a choice of deleting the page or renaming it so it contains a prefix “Controversial Humor”. Once renamed, Facebook staff then make the material publically available again. In those rare cases Facebook regards as violations, page administrators are banned from Facebook for 24 hours. They soon return and begin publically vowing to continue their campaign of hate.

Having been personally targeted with three fake profiles and three antisemitic pages that used my picture, all of which were removed, it appears to me that Facebook will respond when a person is attacked, but not when a group is attacked. This distinction is not consistent with the meaning of hate speech, a term designed to protect minority groups from group defamation as well as personal attack for being a member of the group.

OHPI has drawn up a petition to Facebook, demanding that they stop automatically rejecting online hate complaints. You can read and sign the petition here. And to think I know a blogger who was kicked off Facebook for not using his real name....

Labels: anti-Semitism, Facebook

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:54 AM