 The Biden White House on Thursday called on "all online platforms" to ban "extremist websites," ban "hate speech" and institute "zero tolerance" policies to protect Jews from antisemitism.
The bold and highly illegal censorship effort forms the cornerstone of the White House's new "National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism."
The Anti-Defamation League took credit for crafting the vast majority of the plan.
"To counter hate and antisemitism," the plan says, "the Biden-Harris Administration encourages all online platforms to independently commit to the following actions":
- Ensure terms of service and community standards explicitly cover antisemitism. The Administration commends platforms with terms of service and community standards that establish "zero-tolerance" for hate speech, including antisemitism. All online platforms are encouraged to adopt zero-tolerance terms of service and community standards.
- Permanently ban repeat offenders, both personal accounts and extremist websites.
- Invest in the human and technical resources necessary to enable vigorous and timely enforcement of their terms of service and community standards. Currently, many platforms do not adequately invest in enforcement of their terms of service and community standards, and numerous platforms have recently shed significant portions of their trust and safety workforces, leading to documented increases in hate speech on their platforms.
- Improve capabilities to stop recommending and de-rank antisemitic and other hateful content. Extensive research has shown that online platforms’ algorithmic recommendation and ranking systems—depending on the incentives driving them—can amplify and spread extremist and antisemitic content.
- Increase the transparency of their algorithmic recommendation systems and data, and allow for public interest research to ascertain how these systems amplify and spread hate speech and antisemitic content to inform better content moderation tools and approaches. Antisemitism should be treated as a distinct category in transparency reports, and platforms should report on the volume of antisemitic content adjudicated on platforms.
- Encourage and support trusted community moderators who receive dedicated, ongoing training in hate speech and bias, including antisemitism and its tropes.
- Use their reach to raise awareness of antisemitism while also ensuring users have credible and factual information about Jewish people, antisemitism, and the Holocaust.
- Engage frequently with civil society groups that actively monitor antisemitism in media and online to stay abreast of the latest developments.
- Listen to the concerns of Jewish communities around the world to understand how Jewish users experience antisemitism and hate on their platforms and ensure antisemitism is understood, recognized, and properly addressed.
- Establish relationships with Jewish community organizations to share best practices related to reporting hate speech and utilizing platforms to lift up Jewish stories. No other group is afforded any such privileges.
The full plan includes over 100 actions to "fight antisemitism."
From The Washington Post, "White House releases national strategy to counter antisemitism":
The White House on Thursday pledged to increase federal efforts to combat rising antisemitism with new initiatives aimed at improving public awareness in places such as schools and college campuses and offering more community training to encourage the reporting of hate crimes.
In its national strategy to counter antisemitism, the White House also calls on social media companies to more aggressively prevent the spread of hate speech and anti-Jewish content online. It asks Congress to hold accountable those platforms that do not provide transparency on how such content is disseminated.
The plan lays out dozens of commitments from the Biden administration to help protect Jewish communities, while calling on Congress and local governments to follow suit.
[...] White House officials touted the scheduled opening next year at the Holocaust Memorial Museum of the first U.S.-based Holocaust research center as part of a broader federal effort to increase education about the dangers of antisemitism. Federal agencies are committing to more training around diversity, equity and inclusion to root out workplace discrimination and violence.
The Homeland Security Department and Justice Department will conduct community workshops to counter hate-motivated violence, and the National Security Council will develop technical assistance for local jurisdictions to monitor and prevent attacks, officials said. "When they say stuff like this, they mean they want to go after conservatives," Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert (R) said in response to the plan. "Their tactics are straight out of the USSR's playbook."
No other elected Republican or Democrat has criticized the plan.
Why does "fighting antisemitism" always involve censorship and attacking the First Amendment?
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