Facebook sanctioned the page of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again on Tuesday by briefly taking down its chatbot, days after it took a similar measure because of a violation of the company's hate speech policy.
Facebook said the measure was because Netanyahu's page did not follow Israel's campaign laws by allegedly publishing polling data on the day of the election.
"We work with elections committees all over the world in order to ensure ethical purity in elections," A spokeswoman for Facebook said. "Our policy explicitly states that users are required to uphold all of the state's laws where our app is used. Therefore, we suspended the activity of the chatbot after it violated local laws, until after the election."
Several hours later, the company said it had restored the chatbot after Netanyahu vowed not to violate Israeli campaign laws.
On Thursday, the social network had suspended for 24 hours the page's chatbot, or automated chat function that promoted the Likud's campaign ahead of the Knesset election, where Netanyahu hopes to win a fifth term in office.
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The bot had called on voters to prevent the establishment of a government composed of "Arabs who want to destroy us all – women, children and men." The post sparked uproar by opposition politicians.
After the suspension last week, Netanyahu denied he wrote the post in an interview with Israel Radio. He said it was a staffer's mistake and the post was removed.
