Facebook and community groups publish guide to protect Jews on the site

A guidance booklet to protect Jews on Facebook has been published by the tech giant in collaboration with two of British Jewry’s most prominent organisations.

The Community Security Trust (CST) and the Board of Deputies helped launch the 20-page guide, titled ‘Protecting the Jewish Community from Antisemitism on Facebook,’ as part of National Hate Crime Awareness Week.

While Facebook has an international army of 30,000 content reviewers, the guide says Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms – designed to detect antisemitic content before it is seen and reported – have “come a long way”.

While the technology is “not perfect,” almost three million posts that violated the company’s rules around hate speech were pulled offline by “proactive” AI detection in the first three months of this year alone – about two thirds of the total.

Facebook defines hate speech as a direct attack on people based on protected characteristics such as race, ethnicity, national origin or religious affiliation. It defines ‘attack’ as violent or dehumanising speech, statements of inferiority, or calls for exclusion or segregation. Posts doing so violate Facebook’s community standards.

For a number of years, CST has worked with Facebook as a “trusted flagger” of violating and harmful content, and acts as a “critical friend” to the platform, advising on policy development and content regulation.

The guide explains how to submit reports and feedback to Facebook if harmful content is seen. It also gives information on anti-bullying features such as ‘snoozing’ people or groups, controlling what people see, and protecting accounts and privacy, for instance by using two-factor authentication.

In a blog post published on Thursday, CST said the guide “shows increasing awareness at Facebook of the issue of antisemitism and how it affects our Jewish community”.