Mashable: Twitter will publicly flag tweets that violate its terms of service. “There’s nothing like a little public pressure to get someone to clean up their act. Twitter announced a change on Wednesday that will make it clear when someone has posted a tweet that violates Twitter’s terms of service.” What concerns me about this is that some really disturbing things apparently don’t violate Twitter’s terms of service — like, oh, comparing Jewish people to termites.
Anti-Semitism
From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists Were “Red-Pilled” (Bellingcat)
Bellingcat: From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists Were “Red-Pilled”. “The vast majority of domestic terror attacks in the U.S. are carried out by white supremacist organizations. Atomwaffen, a neo-Nazi death squad with five killings to their name, is probably the deadliest fascist group to have arisen since 2016. One member of Atomwaffen, Vasillios Pistolis, was an active duty U.S. marine when he marched at the first Unite the Right rally. Pistolis also posted regularly on a series of fascist and white supremacist Discord servers, prior to and after joining Atomwaffen. The media collective Unicorn Riot has archived hundreds of thousands of posts from these Discord servers. Their database includes dozens of conversations where fascists discuss how they were converted to their extremist beliefs. In an effort to understand that process, Bellingcat collected ‘red-pilling’ stories from seventy-five fascist activists. The analysis is below, details on the activists we studied can be found here.” Disturbing content, to say the least.
The Verge: Bing and Yahoo are suggesting offensive searches
The Verge: Bing and Yahoo are suggesting offensive searches. “Bing and Yahoo, which is powered by Bing, are both suggesting offensive content within their search features. How-To Geek spotted that Bing’s image search is serving up suggestions for related topics that contain racist terms, the sexualization of minors, and otherwise offensive content. The Verge then found that this problem extends to Yahoo: its homepage search box includes an autocomplete feature that populates racist phrases, and the results often prioritize the company’s Yahoo Answers posts that contain offensive material.” As you might imagine, the article contains / links to a lot of offensive content.
Washington Post: Racism and anti-Semitism surged in corners of the Web after Trump’s election, analysis shows
Washington Post: Racism and anti-Semitism surged in corners of the Web after Trump’s election, analysis shows. “Racist and anti-Semitic content has surged on shadowy social media platforms — spiking around President Trump’s Inauguration Day and the ‘Unite the Right Rally’ in Charlottesville — spreading hate speech and extremist views to mainstream audiences, according to an analysis published this week. The findings, from a newly formed group of scientists named the Network Contagion Research Institute who studied hundreds of millions of social media messages, bolster a growing body of evidence about how extremist speech online can be fueled by real-world events.”
Radio Praha: New Website Documents Communist-Era Anti-Semitism
Radio Praha: New Website Documents Communist-Era Anti-Semitism. “Israel as the headquarters for Rothschild political power, kibbutzs as indoctrination centres and Jewish schools as centres of racist, militaristic teaching. These are just a few of the themes contained within videos and posters from the communist era now accessible via a website just launched by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, which oversees communist-era files and other materials.” The site is in Czech, but the automatic translation was easy to read.
New York Times: New York City Is Briefly Labeled ‘Jewtropolis’ on Snapchat and Other Apps
New York Times: New York City Is Briefly Labeled ‘Jewtropolis’ on Snapchat and Other Apps. “Users of a variety of popular apps and services, including Snapchat, awoke Thursday morning to find that New York City had been relabeled ‘Jewtropolis’ on maps displayed in the apps.”
CNET: Facebook screws up again on the Holocaust, this time with photo of children
CNET: Facebook screws up again on the Holocaust, this time with photo of children. “The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect last week called on its 112,000 followers to sign a petition demanding that Facebook remove pages denying the Holocaust from its site. That didn’t happen. Instead, a week later, Facebook removed a news article that the center posted about Holocaust education ‘for apparently violating community standards,’ the center said. The violation: It included a photo showing naked, emaciated children from a Nazi concentration camp.”
