The real-world consequences of online hate
Antisemitism, the world’s oldest bigotry, festers around the globe and at home, where it’s at its worst since incident records have been kept.
In recent days, a brawl attributed to insults broke out between soccer teams of Jewish and Catholic schools in Miami, a bicyclist was attacked and beaten in Broward County by someone who heard him speaking in Hebrew on a cellphone, and two Jewish worshippers were shot outside synagogues in Los Angeles. U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Parkland, reported receiving more than 200 hatefilled responses to a Twitter post.
The Anti-Defamation League reported a record 2,717 incidents in 2021, up 34% from the year before. A survey last year found more than three-fourths of Americans believe at least one common antisemitic trope and 20% hold to six or more of them.
It can’t happen here? It is happening here.
The role of social media
Social media behemoths inflame bigotry, but efforts to hold them responsible clash with a federal law that shields them as if they were phone carriers. It’s Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Two cases challenging that were heard by the U.S. Supreme Court this week. The parents of Nohemi Gonzalez, an American college student slain during terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, are appealing for the right to sue Google over ISIS posts on YouTube that they say led to the killings. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks, which killed 130 people. The family of Nawras Alassaf, a Jordanian citizen, are seeking damages from Twitter for his death in a 2017 ISIS attack on a nightclub in Istanbul. However, they don’t allege that the terrorists in that attack ever used Twitter. Both families sued under the
1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.
These cases won’t be easy calls because of the First Amendment. Whatever the court decides may force Congress to act. Either way, the issue is too grave to ignore.
Twitter, Facebook and similar platforms are commercial ventures that depend on advertising. They tailor their feeds to users’ consumer tastes, based on what their algorithms say. The algorithms, the Gonzalezes argue, make social media the publisher rather than merely the distributor of the hate speech that the algorithms select, especially when ad revenue is shared with authors of the posts.
An antisemite fired up by social media murdered 11 Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2017, one of six fatal attacks since 2016. Last January, another terrorist took hostages at a synagogue in Texas. He recited the antisemitic trope that “Jews control the world” and demanded the release of a woman imprisoned for aiding
terrorists in Afghanistan.
Social media has figured in virtually every racially motivated major incident in recent years, whether the victims were Black, Hispanic or Jewish. Former President Trump’s perceived coziness with some antisemites is part of the problem.
Antisemitism on the rise
Since October, the ADL has documented some 30 incidents quoting or referring to Ye, the antisemitic entertainer and designer formerly known as Kanye West, whom Trump invited to Mar-aLago. Those include “vandalism, banner drops, targeted harassment, and campus propaganda distributions,” including at Florida Atlantic University. Ye has been banned again from Twitter, and should stay banned.
Media like Twitter and Facebook have been unable or unwilling to adequately monitor what is posted on their own pages. They can’t reasonably see everything before it goes out, but they should be responsible for taking down what is intended to incite hateful acts.
The lethal influence of antisocial media has been felt in tragic incidents around the world, from New York to New Zealand.
“I believed what I read online and acted out of hate,” said the 19-year-old who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket at a sentencing hearing last week.
New York Attorney General Letitia James made the same point in a detailed report on the shooting.
“Several online platforms played an undeniable role in this racist attack,” she said, “first by radicalizing the shooter as he consumed voluminous amounts of racist and violent content, helping him prepare for the attack, and finally allowing him to broadcast it.”
Social media, as private companies, are under misguided pressure from some right-wing politicians to allow even more latitude than they do.
The James report suggested a balance between free speech and responsibility.
Since buying Twitter, Elon Musk has decimated the platform’s content monitors. One of those let go was an algorithmic expert named Rumman Chowdhury. Writing in The Atlantic, she said she was hired to “help protect users, particularly people who already face broader discrimination, from algorithmic harm.
“But months into Musk’s takeover,” she wrote, “it seems no one is keeping watch.”
The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board includes Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson, Opinion Page Editor Krys Fluker and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Anderson. Send letters to insight@orlandosentinel.com.