A recent report by the American Jewish Committee on "the state of anti-Semitism in America" reveals that one out of five American Jews (22%) has been the target of an anti-Semitic remark online or through social media in the last five years.
AJC data also found that 46% of American Jews who said they reported online anti-Semitism to a social media platform said no steps were taken to address the incident.
In the wake of this report, AJC's US Director for Combating Antisemitism Holly Huffnagle briefed members of the inter-parliamentary task force on online anti-Semitism established in September with representatives from the US Congress, Australia, Canada, Israel, and the United Kingdom.
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"The AJC report shows that American Jews feel intimidated and chilled from speaking. The online space is not an equal free speech playing field. It is imperative to our efforts that anti-Semitic content is reported and removed when it violates the platform's policies," she said.
According to Huffnagle, social media platforms should adopt the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism. A universal standard will allow artificial intelligence and human moderators to be more effective in removing and banning all anti-Semitic content.
She also suggested that the task force create an international group of analysts, data scientists, and tech experts to research various social media platforms' current algorithms to ensure they don't promote hateful content. A detailed understanding of the algorithms will empower the task force to recommend the necessary technical changes needed to adjust the algorithms.
The task force is in a unique positional insofar as it can work with other countries, especially in Southeast Asia and in former Soviet republics, to battle anti-Semitism on non-mainstream platforms. Today anti-Semitic radicalization is more on fringe platforms. Many anti-Semitic and racist websites chose outside hosting domains because they have fewer restrictions.
Huffnagle offered two specific recommendations for members of Congress: she asked the US representatives who serve on the task force and their colleagues in Congress to support reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to hold tech companies liable if their algorithms promote harmful content.
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