US study on hate speech: “Facebook is the worst”

The five major social networks rarely delete anti-Semitic hate mail. That is the result of a US study. Facebook and TikTok performed particularly poorly – they do not face any consequences.

For two months, Imran Ahmed and his team from the Center Against Digital Hate Messages (CCDH) observed anti-Semitic hate messages in Washington. They had previously identified 714 entries on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube and reported these to the platforms using their reporting tools.

The hate messages were not in need of interpretation, but clearly anti-Semitic, says Ahmed. Jews and all Israelis should have died in the Holocaust, was read. “Hitler was glorified and Jews were called vermin and disease.”

Facebook vowed to crack down on it

After two months, the team checked how many of the reported entries were still online. Ahmed and his team were shocked by two figures: During this time, the entries were accessed a good 7.3 million times, but only a small part was deleted: just 16 percent across all platforms.

“If you want to know which company is best at handling this content, you end up in the hairstyle competition of five bald men. All of them did poorly, but the worst was Facebook,” says Ahmed.

The results of the study are in stark contrast to what, for example, Facebook announced last October. At that time, the company of Mark Zuckerberg announced that from now on it would no longer allow content that denied the Holocaust.

“Real World Impact”

CCDH boss Ahmed says that the major social media platforms are unable or unwilling to take effective action against anti-Semitic contributions. “I suspect it’s greed and laziness, and it’s the inability to see that these entries are actually having an impact on the real world.”

Not only Jews are victims of attacks in the offline world; Blacks and Muslims are also exposed to attacks. As examples, Ahmed cites the genocide of the Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar, which was incited on social media, or the storming of the US Capitol on January 6th by Trump supporters.

25 year old law

These entries are only deleted where there are strict laws against anti-Semitic hate messages, such as in Germany. In the USA, however, this does not happen precisely because a telecommunications law from 1996 protects the Silicon Valley corporations, says the CCDH researcher. The big social media platforms didn’t exist back then.

“The law exempts companies from any responsibility for third-party content. I think we will see changes here soon,” says Ahmed. Until then, the platforms would not have to fear any consequences.

Bad grades for TikTok

The study did not only examine user entries. The distribution of hashtags on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok was also examined. Clearly anti-Semitic hashtags were viewed up to 3.3 million times during the two-month observation period.

The center against digital hate messages also gave the video platform TikTok particularly bad marks. The Chinese company fails to block users who send hateful messages to Jewish users via direct messages. Only five percent of these accounts are blocked by TikTok.