Facebook and Twitter remove anti-Semitic accounts after community complaints

Facebook and Twitter both removed the accounts of anti-Semitic users this week, after lawyers and community security chiefs complained to the companies.

Lawyers from the US-based Lawfare Project successfully issued take-down notices to Facebook over several accounts posting anti-Semitic content including Holocaust denial.

It follows controversial comments from Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg last week, in which he said the company wouldn’t remove Holocaust denial material because “there are things that different people get wrong, I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong”.

Lawyers said Facebook’s content policy, “however well-intentioned, is both inconsistent and, in many European countries illegal,” noting that in some states Holocaust denial violates both criminal and civil law, as both a criminal offence and as a libel against the Jewish people.

Elsewhere, Britain’s Community Security Trust (CST) was applauded for pushing Twitter to remove the accounts of an anti-Semitic user, who wrote: “I wish Hitler had of wiped you bunch of horrible f**** out.” The same user added: “If I had the chance I would ethnically cleanse your putrid little apartheid sectarian Zionist state.”

Twitter had originally said there was “no violation of Twitter rules” but following a second enquiry from the CST, a spokesman wrote: “It appears as though we missed a violation. We have now locked the account.”