The Anti-Defamation League has called on Facebook’s Oversight Board to overturn the social-media platform’s decision to leave content online that the Jewish group said “promote anti-Semitism in clear contravention of the company’s community standards” against hate speech.
“Facebook’s inaction has helped spread [the] hatred of Jews and has contributed to historical[ly] high levels of anti-Semitism in America, and anti-Semitism online and offline across the globe,” wrote the ADL in a letter to the Facebook Oversight Board on Wednesday.
Included in the letter are seven public anti-Semitic posts that Facebook refused to remove, despite requests by the ADL. One features a quote from Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels; another includes the statement “Hitler was right” in connection to Israel’s 11-day conflict last month with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
“We request that the Oversight Board overturn this decision and send a clear message that anti-Semitism has no place on Facebook,” wrote the ADL. “We request that the Oversight Board put a stop to the implicit promotion of antis-Semitism on Facebook by overruling Facebook’s decisions to permit such content to flourish.”
The ADL argued that such posts “traffic in long-standing conspiracies and tropes” that have been used for centuries “to justify persecution, from pogroms under czarist governments, to genocide under the Nazi regime, to shootings in this country.”
The group concluded by asking the board to “use your independence to take action to ensure Facebook does not continue to propagate anti-Semitism. We also ask that you direct Facebook to provide sufficient resources and make necessary product changes to enforce currently existing policies at scale.”
