Not long ago, if the conversation veered toward anti-Semitism onthe Internet, it would focus on what seemed like an endless numberof dedicated hate sites. These sites were so ubiquitous that Google,which relies on complex computer codes called algorithms to findentries that are relevant to what's typed in its search window,would trumpet the hate site Jew Watch at the very top of its resultsfor the word "Jew."
The barrage of complaints that rolled in apparently made Googlerethink at least some of its algorithms - so that typing the word"Jew" now brings in, high on the list of results, the followingdisclaimer:
"If you recently used Google to search for the word "Jew," youmay have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you thatthe views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any wayendorsed by Google. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomaliesto appear that cannot be predicted. A search for 'Jew' brings up onesuch unexpected result."
While there is far more than just one "unexpected result"(dedicated hate sites have probably multiplied since the Google/Jewuproar was first heard), some of the hatred has been migrating to astill evolving phenomenon called Internet 2.0. A sobriquet conjuredup to imply a completely new Internet - which, in a way, it is -Internet 2.0 is unlike traditional websites designed for passiveuse. Internet 2.0 is built around what's called "interoperability."This is hi-tech-speak for user interaction, and its denizens includesocial networking sites like the immensely popular Facebook andvideo-sharing sites such as Google's YouTube, where, according topublicists, the servers upload 35 hours worth of footage from usersevery minute.
Internet 2.0 brings people together and further democratizes analready democratic medium. It allows anyone with a computer browserand modem - and no web publishing knowledge at all - to post text,photos, audio recordings and videos on the World Wide Web, usuallyfor free. That's clearly a significant upside, and to revert to anold catchphrase, it can be very good for the Jews.
On Facebook alone, one can find any number of pages devoted tothings Jewish and Israeli, ranging from organizations such asChabad, USY and Peace Now to ad hoc groups calling themselves "IStand with Israel Today" and "I'm Not Yelling... I'm Jewish...That's How We Talk." And as for YouTube, who among us in the lead-up to Passover did not receive at least one e-card or e-mail linkedto an impressive holiday video presentation or a hilarious renditionof an old classic somehow reworked into a modern-day iteration ofMoses and the 10 plagues?
Israeli officials responsible for hasbara - a Hebrew term thatrefers to explaining Israel's official policies and points of view -have zeroed in on Internet 2.0. The army has its own YouTube"channel" (www.youtube.com/user/idfnadesk) with how-to videos forsoon-to-be inductees - along with spy drone footage of rocket-launching crews at work in Gaza. And Benjamin Netanyahu got in onthe act in late March when he was interviewed in a live televisionbroadcast that, because it simultaneously appeared on YouTube,allowed questions to be put verbally to the prime minister in realtime from around the world.
The official Internet 2.0 face of Israel is the ForeignMinistry's Information and Internet Department.
"Over two years ago, we noticed that more and more people aregetting their information from social media and not just fromwebsites," department head Chaim Shacham tells The Jerusalem Report."We don't really have a strong sense of where the best hasbarashould be, so we decided to go where most of the people are."
The department has its own Facebook page (www.facebook.com/israelmfa), YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/israel) and Twitteraccount (www.twitter.com/israel), and uses them for what might betermed "proactive hasbara."
"We view our business as branding Israel, not defending it,"Shacham says. "More and more people can identify with Israel if theycan identify with the content. People using the new media usuallywant a burst of information and then to be drawn in. We use Internet2.0 as a net, and then try to guide them to Internet 1.0 for areservoir of content."
On Facebook, the netting process begins when a client looks up afriend. The friend's page reflects things he or she does and likes.If the friend has seen the Foreign Ministry's Facebook page andrecommends it to others, the friend will note this with the now-omnipresent "Like." And because so much of Facebook relies on links -perhaps the World Wide Web's most unique tool - if the friend hasn'tposted a "Like" for the ministry's page, there's a chance the clientwill link to the page of a mutual friend who has.
Once you reach the Foreign Ministry's Facebook page you'll seeShacham's "burst of information," links that take you to his"Internet 1.0," the ministry's dedicated website (www.mfa/gov.il).That site is jam-packed with just about everything you might want toknow about Israel - or, to be more blunt, just about everythingIsrael would want you to know. It is, after all, about branding.
"Yes, we want people to know about issues," he tells The Report."But we want them to learn about them while learning about Israelwith its rich history, about the innovative Israel with hi-techsuccess and business opportunities, and about the Israel experience,with its tourism, arts and multiculturalism."
Of course, as with any website, the address of one's Facebook,YouTube and Twitter page is important: the simpler and more direct,the easier it is to remember. The Foreign Ministry's YouTube andTwitter pages once had the "MFA" suffix that its Facebook page stillhas, but just plain "Israel" has been the goal.
"YouTube was withholding the name and we had to go through alengthy process to prove we were the official representative of theIsraeli government," Shacham explains. "With Twitter it was a littledifferent. It turns out that a pornographer in Florida whose firstname is Israel owned the name. We ended up paying him $5,000 for therights."
So much for the up - or lighter - side of Internet 2.0. Itsbiggest downside, on the other hand, is the ease of accessibilityfor purveyors of hatred and hostility. And with regard to Israel,these are not limited just to anti-Semites or Israel-bashers. Theyprominently included Jews and Israelis who vent their wrath on Arabsand on each other.
The recent brouhaha over a Facebook advocacy page in Arabictitled The Third Intifada serves as an illustration. On the surface,The Third Intifada exhorted followers from the West Bank and otherArab countries to stage something of a "million-man march" right upto the border with Israel on May 15, the Gregorian date of Israel'sindependence and a day the Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, orthe catastrophe. However, according to critics, the page had anundertone that could be construed as incitement to hatred and evenviolence against both Israelis and Jews, while user comments oftenwere much less subtle.
Jewish watchdog groups, such as the Anti-Defamation League,appealed to Facebook, which in late March, after a bit of footdragging, removed the page. Nonetheless, it has since reappeared inseveral forms, in turn spawning Facebook pages such as "Against theThird Palestinian Intifada" and "Crush the Third Intifada Page."
"New ways of using the web, such as social networking sites likeFacebook and user-generated content sites such as YouTube, have ledto an explosion of online bullying," says Deborah Lauter, ADL'sdirector for civil rights. "Social networking sites are also used topromulgate hate and extremist content, increasing the depth andbreadth of hate material that is available and which confronts non-extremist users," she tells The Report.
Lauter says her organization works directly with "serviceproviders such as Facebook" to confront the problem.
"Our discussions are fruitful and ongoing," she says. "It iscritical to note that the amount of material - Facebook has hundredsof millions of pages, YouTube has hours of videos uploaded everysecond, and Twitter has 140 million tweets per day - makes itvirtually impossible for pre-posting policing of material."
Replying to a Jerusalem Report query on the Intifada page matter,Facebook spokesman Simon Axten e-mailed the following - apparentlyboilerplate - response: "[W]e don't typically take down content thatspeaks out against countries, religions, political entities, orideas. However, we monitor Pages that are reported to us, and whenthey degrade to direct calls for violence or expressions of hate, wehave and will continue to remove them."
The spokesman referred to the specific issue as follows:
"The Third Palestinian Intifada Page, while using a term that hasbeen associated with violence in the past [referring to the termIntifada - ed], began as a call for peaceful protest. In addition,the administrators initially removed comments that promotedviolence. However, once the Page gathered publicity, commentsdeteriorated to direct calls for violence, and eventually, the Pageadministrators themselves also participated in these calls. Aftersending several warnings to the administrators about posts thatviolated our policies, we removed the Page."
Enter Andre Oboler, a social media expert who directs theCommunity Internet Engagement Project at the Zionist Federation ofAustralia and co-chairs the working group on online anti-Semitismfor the Israeli Foreign Ministry's Global Forum for CombatingAntisemitism. Oboler holds a PhD in computer science and in 2007-2008 was a post-doctoral fellow in political science at Israel's Bar-Ilan University.
Taking his cue from the moniker given the new interactiveInternet when it began gathering speed several years ago, Obolercoined the term "anti-Semitism 2.0."
"The difference from classic anti-Semitism," he tells The Report,"is that it tries to put on a socially acceptable face. Success herelowers social resistance to bigotry."
By way of example, Oboler says he is bothered less by Stormfront,an openly anti-Semitic website run by white supremacists, than he iswith the ostensibly benign Facebook, which can give similar materiala veneer of respectability.
"I'm not so concerned about the spread of hate among people whohate us already," he says. "I'm far more concerned about the spreadof hate material to our friends and to those we'd want to be ourfriends in the future."
Beyond the veneer, he says, the issue is also in thepresentation.
"Anti-Semitism 2.0 mixes 50 percent racism and 50 percent claimsof why it's not racism. It compares Israel to Nazis, but goes on tosay 'we're not racists,' and then offers what it calls citations,but which are not really citations," Oboler explains.
He claims that this modus operandi is particularly striking onWikipedia. "You see a lot of things that are referenced to faulty,misused and fictitious citations. It is an attempt to portray hatredas an academic argument, all wrapped up in a legitimate websiterather than an overtly hateful site."
An overtly hateful website, he goes on, is much easier to haveremoved or filtered by search engines. "But you're not going to pulldown Facebook because of the anti-Semitism it contains. So thequestion is, what sort of ethical stand are Facebook and YouTube,for example, going to take on enforcement against hate messages?"
Facebook's Axten offers a short and, again, stock explanation ofpolicy.
"Facebook is highly self-regulating," his statement reads. "Weprovide report links on nearly every page and encourage people tolet us know when they see something they think might violate ourstandards. Our team of investigators reviews and takes action onreported content according to our policies."
Paul Solomon, spokesman for YouTube in Israel, is equallysuccinct. "Essentially, the community is the first line of defense.We review all flagged videos quickly, and if we find that they doviolate the Guidelines, we remove them."
Yet he provides a bit of depth by explaining just how thecompany's review system works:
"There are three components," Solomon wrote in response to arequest from The Report. "1) The community flags the video. Despitethe rumor that flagging campaigns will remove a video, a single flagis sufficient to trigger this system. 2) Our algorithms prioritizethe video in the queue. The algorithms examine things like fleshtones (for sexual content), the history of previous flags (i.e., hasit been flagged and approved before?), and a few other demographicfactors. 3) Our reviewers perform a manual review using our reviewtool."
In reconsidering a video, YouTube looks at both content andintent.
"Consider, for example, the video of the death of [post-electiondemonstrator] Neda Soltan in Iran," Solomon continues. "We havepolicies that prohibit shocking or graphic content. On the face ofit, a video showing a young woman bleeding to death would likely beremoved if it were flagged. But we make exceptions for videos thathave educational, documentary, scientific or artistic (EDSA) value,provided that it is balanced with the additional context."
More recently, the Israel-based Palestinian Media Watch (PMW),which, according to its website, looks for mass incitement anddemonization against Israel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, had arun-in with YouTube, where it maintained its own channel.Apparently, an organized flagging campaign was mounted against PMW,and YouTube, most likely having taken only a superficial lookwithout considering the context, eventually removed enough PMWvideos to justify shutting down the entire channel - which, after ashort appeal process, was reopened.
The same happened to a photo presentation uploaded by Jewishsettlers after the government, in a highly controversial move,released graphic and gruesome photos of the bodies of five membersof the Fogel family, including a three-month-old baby, who werebutchered in their West Bank settlement in March. The move, Israeliofficials openly said, was intended to show the true brutality ofArab terrorism, but YouTube looked at the content and said no -although it later relented.
Facebook and YouTube seem to have divergent approaches, Obolertells The Report. "With YouTube it's 'If in doubt, remove.' WithFacebook it's, 'If in doubt, don't remove.'"
In a report published earlier this year, Oboler illustrates thatflags and even written complaints might not always be enough, evenwith YouTube, where a group calling itself "theytnazism" presented a"list of people we hate and we want to kill 1. Blacks, 2. Jews, 3.Indians."
"I reported this to YouTube in February [2010]," Oboler writes,"and on November 22 - 10 months later - [the group's YouTube page]was still active.... I then included [a screenshot of the page] in aset of slides for a conference on anti-Semitism run by the WorldZionist Organization in France... and suddenly the group was gone."
He believes this was not coincidental, as other groups he hadcomplained to YouTube about, but never mentioned publicly, remainedonline.
"It's all good and well to tell the public to report things,"Oboler tells The Report. "Having people flag things is far moreeffective than any algorithms. But what happens afterward? Theproblem is how you decide when you've crossed the bridge. Thedriving force that pushes these companies to do anything is publicpressure. It becomes a threat in a corporate sense."
In a forthcoming report titled "A legal model for governmentintervention to combat online hate," Oboler, as part of his workwith the Zionist Federation of Australia, calls on that country tobroaden existing anti-hate laws to more effectively combat thegrowing phenomenon on the Internet.
"Governments have a responsibility to take an active role in theonline world; if they don't they cannot meet their wider obligationsto the people they serve," he writes. "The powers, rights andlimitations that apply to governments and private citizens in thereal world need to be reflected online."
He also aims his words at "[t]hose advising clients in thetechnology sector," warning them that they "should be aware of thepotential for increased government intervention."
Oboler tells The Report that "the use of new media technology canbring governments and communities together. It's just a channel thatcan be used for good and for ill, and we have to maximize its usefor good."
(c) Copyright Jerusalem Post. All rights reserved.
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