Rabbi Abraham Cooper, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told JNS that large social media companies lack a sense of responsibility to the collective good.
Most major social-media platforms fail to respond to online hate, and extremism disinformation sponsored by foreign states, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s annual report card on digital terror and hate.
The Los Angeles-based nonprofit scored popular digital platforms on 36 factors, based on “responsiveness to flagged hate speech, enforcement of content policies, transparency, cooperation with law enforcement and adherence to international standards, such as the IHRA working definition of antisemitism and the EU Digital Services Act,” the center stated.
Roblox, a gaming platform for children, was the only platform to get a grade better than a C. It got a B-plus. Facebook (Instagram), Google (YouTube), TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitch, Spotify and Amazon all received C or C-minus grades, while sites like X, Discord, Rumble and Truth Social barely passed, and Telegram and Gab received F grades.
Some of the lowest-performing platforms, which have about 3 billion active monthly users, are loosening content standards and dismantling safeguards that protect users, per the report card.
“It’s flashing red lights,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, director of global social action for the Wiesenthal Center, told JNS. (He said the center has spent nearly three decades fighting online extremism.)
“We’re in touch with middle-level management in places like TikTok, where they removed probably millions of items,” he said. “But nobody seems to get the broader issue, which is that a lot of those folks go right back on.”
There is grave concern that social-media executives, many consumed by a political “us versus them” mentality, have come to accept hate and extremism on their sites if it aligns with their political leanings, according to Cooper.
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