I hate to see Jews at the forefront of restrictions on free speech.<\/p>\n
The Forward reports Oct. 24, 2014<\/a>:<\/p>\n A little over a year after a French court forced Twitter to remove some anti-Semitic content, experts say the ruling has had a ripple effect, leading other Internet companies to act more aggressively against hate speech in an effort to avoid lawsuits. I hate to see Jews at the forefront of restrictions on free speech. The Forward reports Oct. 24, 2014: A little over a year after a French court forced Twitter to remove some anti-Semitic content, experts say the ruling has … Continue reading
\nThe 2013 ruling by the Paris Court of Appeals settled a lawsuit brought the year before by the Union of Jewish Students of France over the hashtag #UnBonJuif, which means \u201ca good Jew\u201d and which was used to index thousands of anti-Semitic comments that violated France\u2019s law against hate speech.
\nSince then, YouTube has permanently banned videos posted by Dieudonne, a French comedian with 10 convictions for inciting racial hatred against Jews. And in February, Facebook removed the page of French Holocaust denier Alain Soral for \u201crepeatedly posting things that don\u2019t comply with the Facebook terms,\u201d according to the company. Soral\u2019s page had drawn many complaints in previous years but was only taken down this year.
\n\u201cBig companies don\u2019t want to be sued,\u201d said Konstantinos Komaitis, a former academic and current policy adviser at the Internet Society, an international organization that encourages governments to ensure access and sustainable use of the Internet. \u201cSo after the ruling in France, we are seeing an inclination by Internet service providers like Google, YouTube, Facebook to try and adjust their terms of service \u2014 their own internal jurisprudence \u2014 to make sure they comply with national laws.\u201d
\nThe change comes amid a string of heavy sentences handed down by European courts against individuals who used online platforms to incite to racism or violence.
\nOn Monday, a British court sentenced one such offender to four weeks in jail for tweeting \u201cHitler was right\u201d to a Jewish lawmaker. Last week, a court in Geneva sentenced a man to five months in jail for posting texts that deny the Holocaust. And in April, a French court sentenced two men to five months in jail for posting an anti-Semitic video.
\n\u201cThe stiffer sentences owe partly to a realization by judges of the dangers posed by online hatred, also in light of cyber-jihadism and how it affected people like Mohammed Merah,\u201d said Christophe Goossens, the legal adviser of the Belgian League against Anti-Semitism, referring to the killer of four Jews at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012.
\nIn the Twitter case, the company argued that as an American firm it was protected by the First Amendment. But the court rejected the argument and forced Twitter to remove some of the comments and identify some of the authors. It also required the company to set up a system for flagging and ultimately removing comments that violate hate speech laws.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"