When Hate Speech Hits Social Media
Ask Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center how he grades Twitter’s efforts to combat anti-Semitic hate speech, and Cooper, the group’s associate dean, won’t even give Twitter an F.
“They haven’t even shown up to the dance yet,” said Cooper, who directs the center’s anti-hate speech efforts.
Facebook, on the other hand, has recently won plaudits from Jewish groups, such as the Anti-Defamation League, for its willingness to censor perceived anti-Semitic hate speech and even some anti-Israel Facebook pages.
The distinct responses from Twitter and Facebook have been no different when Muslims have protested content that they deemed anti-Islamic. Pakistan, for example, recently demanded that Twitter remove alleged anti-Islamic content from its platform, but officials at the mirco-blogging medium refused, leading the government to briefly block access to it for the whole country.
But in 2010, when faced with the same demand from Pakistan that Twitter defied in 2012, Facebook quickly complied.
In the hot, rapidly evolving debate on new social media and the boundaries of free speech, the dichotomy between Twitter and Facebook tells more than just a digital tale of two cities; the response to their divergent stances also sometimes illustrates a maxim as old as the two media are new: It depends on whose ox is being gored.