Story at a glance
- A new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that 84 percent of antisemitic content remains online despite user reports against it.
- Researchers call for overhauls to company policies permitting certain content on their platforms.
- The report brings Section 230 into the forefront over the debate of online content regulation.
Major social media companies have failed to respond and prevent antisemitic posts and content on their web platforms, despite being reported and flagged by users, according to a new report released last Friday.
Conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), the report, called “Failure to Protect,” examined more than 700 posts across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok. The posts had a total of 7.3 million impressions, a metric that gauges user views and interactions, including “likes” and shares.
Researchers concluded that 84 percent of posts which were found to have contained antisemitic content were not removed or augmented by social media regulators after researchers from the CCDH reported them.
Many of the companies, including Facebook, elect to label the post as potentially misleading or inaccurate rather than removing it outright, according to the study. This research further wades into the debate over if and how social media companies should regulate their content.
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“Social media has become a safe space for racists to operate confidently, without fear of consequences, to normalise their conspiracies and hateful rhetoric,” said Imran Ahmed, the CEO of CCDH, in a statement to The Hill.
Separately, 89 percent of the content containing some type of anti-Jewish conspiracy rhetoric, which encapsulates involvement in events ranging from 9/11 to the COVID-19 pandemic, was not acted upon at all, per the CCDH research.
Other racist content allowed are groups and content-linking hashtags centered around antisemitism.
Much of this content is perpetuated online through the rules in Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act of 1996, which was passed prior to the development of the majority of popular social networking sites.
Section 230 grants online platforms protection from liability from the content posted by third-party users, which makes it difficult for content deemed problematic or harmful to be regulated online.
Advocates of Section 230 say that the law protects free speech, a right guaranteed to Americans in the First Amendment, which adds another layer of complexity to repealing or augmenting the law.
Officials at the CCDH recommend overhauling Section 230 and requiring these sites to have moderators who can act on racist or discriminatory content. Specifically, they call on Facebook to remove groups devoted to antisemitism and further requests Instagram and TikTok to ban hashtags associated with anti-Jewish content.
“Social media is how we connect as a society, where we find community,” Ahmed continued. “The platforms who set the rules and enforce those rules must be held accountable for their failure to protect the rights of those communities. No one has a fundamental right to have an account on a social media platform to bully Jews or to spread hatred that we know can end in serious offline harm.”
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