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Facebook Is Collaborating With The Israeli Government To Determine What Should Be Censored (go.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the root-cause dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: The Israeli government and Facebook agreed to work together to determine how to tackle incitement on the social media network, a senior Israeli Cabinet minister said Monday. The announcement came after two government ministers met top Facebook officials to discuss the matter. The Facebook delegation is in Israel as the government pushes ahead with legislative steps meant to force social networks to rein in content that Israel says incites violence. Israel has argued that a wave of violence with the Palestinians over the past year has been fueled by incitement, much of it spread on social media sites. It has repeatedly said that Facebook should do more to monitor and control the content, raising a host of legal and ethical issues over whether the company is responsible for material posted by its users. Both Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, two key figures in Israel's battle against the alleged online provocations, participated in Monday's meeting. Erdan's office said they agreed with Facebook representatives to create teams that would figure out how best to monitor and remove inflammatory content, but did not elaborate further. Erdan and Shaked have proposed legislation that seeks to force social networks to remove content that Israel considers to be incitement. An opposition lawmaker has also proposed a bill seeking to force social networks to self-monitor or face a fine. Facebook said in a statement "online extremism can only be tackled with a strong partnership between policymakers, civil society, academia and companies, and this is true in Israel and around the world." The company did also say that its community standards "make it clear there is non place for terrorists or content that promotes terrorism on Facebook." ABC News reports that "over the past four months Israel submitted 158 requests to Facebook to remove inciting content and another 13 requests to YouTube," according to Shaked. "She said Facebook granted some 95 percent of the requests and YouTube granted 80 percent." All of this adds to the censorship controversy that is currently surrounding Facebook. Last week, Norway's largest newspaper accused Mark Zuckerberg of abusing power after his company decided to censor a historic photograph of the Vietnamese "Napalm Girl," claiming it violated the company's ban on "child nudity."

3 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How about.... by Captain+Arr+Morgan · · Score: 1, Informative

    http://visualizingpalestine.or... The Israeli state was created on top of Palestine.

  2. Re:How about.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    Israel's been at war since 1948. The Arabs made 3 concerted efforts to drive the Jews into the sea and have been defeated each time. Those military defeats were humiliating for the Arab leaders who launched the wars. Next they switched tactics and went on a terrorist killing spree resulting in the Israel's Olympic athletes being killed in 1972. They high jacked airplanes and taken hostages. The even hijacked a cruise ship and pushed a wheel chair bound US citizen into the ocean. Now they switched gears and have taken full advantage of the internet to spread a bunch of lies and there are a lot of idiots who actually believe the BS. They then started firing rockets into Israel to purposely force an Israeli military response while using the carnage left behind to show how brutal Israel is. Their next door neighbors actually pay prisoners convicted of murder. They name streets after people who are nothing more than true terrorists.

    If someone fired one rocket over the US-Mexican border and slightly injured some ones dog the US would kill and destroy anything within 50 miles of the border and station artillery along the border to keep the Mexican's honest. The US travel 5 thousand miles away because they would rather fight over their than at home. Israel enemies are only 2 to 10 miles away and people give them shit for defending against those looking to harm their state.

  3. Re:How about.... by peppepz · · Score: 3, Informative
    To be fair, the term "Palestine" was already in use back in the ancient Egypt, it wasn't invented by the Romans. Also, the Romans never ethnically cleansed the region of the whole Jewish population: they banned them from residing in Jerusalem (which happened, to put things into context, after the Jews lost multiple wars, that themselves started, and that resulted in the killing of hundreds of thousands of Greek and Roman people living in the region). In fact, many Jews already lived outside of Judaea before the Bar Kochba revolt, and many continued living inside of Judaea after.

    (I'm not saying this to deny the facts that the Jews have a history of continued persecution and that the state of Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself.)