by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner
Shurat Hadin has filed a compensatory lawsuit against Facebook for $1 billion for allowing wild incitement promoting the murder of Jews and Israelis.
The Shin Bet security agency announced last week that it had arrested a number of terrorist cells
in Judea and Samaria that had been established, under instructions from
Hezbollah, with the aim of executing terrorist attacks in Israel. One
of the cells, the agency said, had been operating in the Qalqilya area
and was under orders to carry out an attack against an IDF patrol in the
area. The cell leader was one Mustafa Hindi, a resident of Qalqilya --
only 18 years old. Hindi was in contact with a handler and had
instructions to recruit other operatives and carry out attacks against
Israeli targets. According to the reports, it was all done for hefty
sums of money.
Not surprisingly, the
contact between the Hezbollah members and the fresh recruits took place
mainly on Facebook, where the initial contact was established and where
the sides continued to communicate afterward. Hezbollah members formed
ties with Israeli Arabs in the same manner.
This should come as
absolutely no surprise to anyone familiar with the issue of incitement
on social media. For the last year, we at Shurat Hadin -- Israel Law
Center have been stressing the importance of the social media arena. You
could say that the incitement industry has been behind most of the
terrorist attacks in Israel this past year, and social media incitement
plays a key role in that industry.
What is especially
egregious about this phenomenon on Facebook and other social media
networks is that the social media platforms themselves actually benefit
from the traffic generated by videos inciting to violence and terrorism,
and clips that recruit terrorists and provide precise instructions on
how to execute terrorist attacks. Everything is worth money, and a lot
of it. Social networks can censor anything they want, but they choose
not to. Sex, incidentally, they censor. But the murder of Jews is given a
free pass on the internet.
Social media networks
have played a significant role in the dissemination of murderous Islamic
incitement in recent years. To start with, Shurat Hadin has filed a
compensatory lawsuit against Facebook for $1 billion for allowing wild
incitement promoting the murder of Jews and Israelis. This incitement
rages almost unchecked on social media and allows the most radical
organizations to use Facebook's sophisticated platforms to distribute
their messages, and, as the Shin Bet recently reported, directly recruit
new operatives.
Many terrorist
organizations use social media networks to advance their ends, and there
are a number of social media networks that still allow it. Each
terrorist organization comprises plenty of social media users, whose
influence in this arena we must strive to neutralize. As challenging as
this may sound, the path to stopping the next terrorist attack passes
not only through the Shin Bet interrogations rooms or through IDF
ambushes but also through legislation, penalties and litigation to
combat the sophisticated platforms that social media networks provide
terrorist organizations.
Dear Facebook friends, it is not too late to wake up. The writing is on your Facebook wall, in enormous red letters.
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=16981
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