The Facebook Bill, a proposed Israeli law intended to remove content from the internet inciting violence, was approved by the committee and set to go before the Knesset on Tuesday when the Israel Democracy Institute and the Israel Internet Association filed an urgent request with the Knesset’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation to halt the process, claiming the law would pose a threat to free speech. Dubbed the “Facebook bill”, the legislation would empower courts to order companies like Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter to remove posts that the authorities consider “a criminal endangerment to personal, public or national security.”

In their letter to the committee, Dr. Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and head of its Democracy in the Information Age program, and Dr. Asaf Wiener, head of regulation and policy at the Israel Internet Association, outline several main problems with the Facebook Bill.

“The bill is broader than necessary and offers a substantial and procedural opening for government censorship,” the authors wrote. “Moreover, the bill also makes it possible to remove content from institutional content sites, like Israeli and foreign newspapers, at a level of intrusion that does not exist in any other country in the democratic world.”

Under the proposed bill, a judge would be able to issue an order requiring a content publisher to remove posts from its website, if law enforcement agencies are convinced that a criminal offense has been committed through the publication of the content.

Shwartz Altshuler told The Times of Israel on Tuesday that “the law applies to any website, with a paywall, or without, with registration or without. This means that one could go to court and ask for content removal even from news sites, which is unheard of.”

“It’s very wide and there are no limits. There’s no reason to do it like that,” she said.“The legislation contains references to all offenses in the Israeli penal code, and in this sense, it includes what we call ‘the political clauses.’ For example, defaming a political figure or incitement to racism. All these are criminal offenses with enforcement that could be considered very political.”

The potential threat posed by the legislation has been recognized since it was first proposed in 2016. In 2018 then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu removed it from the Knesset docket for this reason.