20,000 Israelis Sue Facebook for Refusal to Block Online Incitement of Terror

Fighting terrorism on all fronts, thousands of Israelis have joined a class-action lawsuit against Facebook for serving as a platform for Palestinian incitement to terrorism and hatred.

Some 20,000 Israelis have joined a class-action lawsuit against Facebook, charging that the social media platform is ignoring posts that include Palestinian incitement and calls to murder Jews.

“While everyone understands the need to keep the web free, Facebook’s decision to allow this flood of terrorist incitement and calls to murder Jews to continue has crossed all red lines,” the Shurat Hadin Law Center, an Israel-based human rights group, which is spearheading this venture, announced.

“Facebook is fanning the flames of the current Palestinian intifada and its refusals to actively monitor and block the incitement to violence is an outrageous abandonment of its obligations to the public,” the human rights group added.

The civil complaint that was filed by Shurat Hadin on Sunday in New York and contains a 76-page list of plaintiffs, seeks an injunction to require Facebook to block all racist incitement and calls for violence against Jews in Israel, but no damages.

The lead plaintiff was Israeli-American Richard Lakin, 76, who was shot in the head and stabbed multiple times while riding a bus in the Armon Hanatziv neighborhood in Jerusalem on October 13 when Palestinian terrorists from Jerusalem, armed with guns and knives, carried out an attack. Lakin died Tuesday morning from his injuries. Two other passengers died during the attack.

The plaintiffs “have been living in the crosshairs of a murderous terrorist rampage carried out by killers who attack people with knives, axes, screwdrivers, cars and Molotov cocktails for no reason other than that the attacker perceives the victims to be Jewish,” the complaint stated.

“Many of these murderers were motivated to commit their heinous crimes by incitement to murder they read on Facebook – demagogues and leaders exhorting their followers to ‘slaughter the Jews,’ and offering instruction as to the best manner to do so, including even anatomical charts showing the best places to stab a human being.”

The law suit adds that Facebook is “far from a neutral or passive social media platform” and has sophisticated tools to contend with hateful content published on its site.

The phenomenon of Palestinians using social media for the spread of hatred is not new, but has significantly increased in the past weeks in tandem with the wave of Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis.

In another instance, Israelis complained to Facebook about a page calling for the stabbing of Israelis and demanded it be removed. Facebook declined to do so until it came under heavy public pressure, after which it obliged.

By: United with Israel Staff