Twitter takes heat for failing to delete antisemitic post
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London: Twitter is being sued in Germany for failing to take down antisemitic material from its website.
The European Union of Jewish Students and the anti-hate speech group HateAid launched the lawsuit on Wednesday, accusing the social network of failing to remove six posts that denigrated Jews and denied the Holocaust despite complaints.
“What starts online does not end online,” said Avital Grinberg, president of the EUJS.
“Twitter broke our trust. By allowing the distribution of hateful content, the company fails to protect users and especially young Jews.”
The two groups claim that Twitter's failure to take down the content is a violation of the terms and conditions of the website.
Anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial are criminal offences in Germany, Arab News reported.
The purpose of the case is to determine whether Twitter and its users have a contract that is violated by this decision and whether users have the right to enforce the terms and conditions of the website.
The outcome of the case, according to HateAid and EUJS, may indicate whether users can go to court in the future to demand that offensive information be taken down, even if they are not personally harmed by it.
“We have put the control over the public discourse on the internet into the hands of private companies and investors. Twitter assures it will not tolerate violence on its platform. Users have to be able to rely on that,” said Josephine Ballon, HateAid’s head of legal.
“But in practice, we see the opposite happening: Illegal content is at best removed in arbitrary and untransparent ways. This must finally change. Twitter owes us a communication platform where we can move freely and without fear of hatred and agitation.”
After being let back on Twitter on Tuesday, the far-right provocateur and white supremacist Nick Fuentes unleashed a barrage of antisemitic messages and comments, including praise for Adolf Hitler.
The amount of hate speech on the site has considerably increased since Elon Musk took control of the business.
Anti-Semitic tweets relating to Jews or Judaism have increased by more than 61 per cent since October, according to statistics from hate monitoring organisations the Anti-Defamation League and the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
In a previous analysis, CCDH discovered that social media businesses frequently did not take any action in response to antisemitism, anti-black racism, sexist abuse, and vaccination misinformation, with anti-muslim content not being removed in 89 per cent of instances.
Some experts argue that the rise is largely attributable to Musk's restructuring of Twitter, which led to the firing of more than 60% of the personnel.