HAIFA, March 7, 2018 (WAFA) - A new study by the Arab Center for Social Media, 7amleh, said that while Facebook has been censoring Palestinian accounts on claim of incitement, the social media giant is loaded with Israeli incitement accounts that go uncensored. It said 82% of the Israeli incitement during 2017 took place on Facebook.
The main findings in the study published on Tuesday showed that every 71 seconds there is an inciting post uploaded against Palestinians; a total of 445,000 calls for violence, hate speech posts and curses against Palestinians; one out of nine posts about Palestinians contains a call for violence or a curse and 50,000 Israeli social media users wrote at least one inciting post against Palestinians.
According to the 7amleh report, 2017 witnessed a rapid upsurge of right-wing Israeli Facebook groups and pages that incite against Palestinians, some of which include The Shadow (an extreme right-wing Israeli singer), Roaring for the Right, Against Extreme Leftist Media, Reclaiming Jewish Nationality, Fighting for the Land of Israel and The Lies of the Leftists (all translated from Hebrew) in addition to the rising incitement perpetrated on Facebook pages of mainstream Israeli media.
This index was developed by monitoring violent and inciting rhetoric according to a list of 100 keywords of expressions, names and personalities in Hebrew with the aim of measuring the level of violent rhetoric and hate speech at the hands of Israeli social media users.
Jerusalem was the main focal point for online violence against Palestinians and the research illustrates that 50,000 inciting posts against Arabs were uploaded in July 2017 alone in light of the events at Al Aqsa mosque and Israel’s attempt to install electronic gates. This online violence was mainly directed towards Palestinian politicians, such as Palestinian-Israeli lawmakers Ahmad Tibi and Haneen Zoabi.
Nadim Nashif, the executive director of 7amleh, said the results of the research, has “exposed Facebook’s complicity in perpetuating the double standards of the Israeli government of silencing and shutting down Palestinian content whilst allowing for the spread of Israeli incitement.”
The Israeli government has jailed hundreds of Palestinians based on this unfounded claim of incitement while it failed to hold any Israeli accountable for online violence, he said.
M.K.
