An “experiment” conducted by an Israeli non-profit organization has proved that when it comes to incitement, Facebook falls squarely into the anti-Israel camp.
Shurat HaDin (the Israel Law Center) is a civil rights NGO dedicated to representing terror victims and promoting Jewish and Israeli issues. On Monday, the organization posted a revealing video to its Facebook page that has since received over 105,000 views and gotten over 7,000 shares.
The video, entitled “The Facebook experiment: Do all lives matter?”, describes an experiment conducted by Shurat HaDin in the interest of discovering whether or not Facebook has a bias when it comes to removing content which incites to violence.
“On 28.15.15, we opened 2 identical inciting Facebook pages with only one difference between them,” the video begins. One page was entitled “Stop Palestinians”, and it was dedicated to inciting violence against Palestinian Arabs. The other, entitled “Stop Israelis”, had the opposite focus of provoking and encouraging violence against Israelis and Jews.
Shurat HaDin began posting near-identical posts to each page simultaneously, making sure to use very similar language on both. As it heightened the level of incitement on the pages, the posts became more aggressive.
On the anti-Israel page, the organization wrote, “Revenge against the zionist enemy that threatens Al Aqsa! Death to all the jews!” The anti-Palestine post read, “Revenge against the arab enemy. Death to all the arabs.” Each post was accompanied by provoking images.
Shurat HaDin then simultaneously reported both pages to Facebook. The page inciting against Palestinians was shut down by Facebook later that day. In a message, Facebook wrote that it had reviewed the page and found that it contained a “credible threat of violence” and violated the site’s community standards.
The page inciting against Jews, however, was not closed, even though both pages were nearly identical, with the same amount and type of inciting posts using the same language. Facebook sent a different message in response to the report which stated that the page was not in violation of its rules.
“From two identical inciting pages, only the one inciting against Palestinians was closed by Facebook,” the video concludes.
“The page inciting against Jews is still open today.”
This is not the first time that Facebook has been accused of an anti-Israel bias. In October, Shurat HaDin began recruiting Israelis for a class-action suit against Facebook for not removing countless pages promoting violence against Jews and Israelis.
In a press release about the suit, Shurat HaDin wrote, “It cannot be that entire pages on Facebook are devoted to incitement to murder Jews and that terrorists are permitted to publish posts that become popular among their friends and encourage them to kill. It is absurd that Facebook is being transformed into a tool for supporting incitement and attacks against Jews”.
