A combination of a recent Holocaust survivors' campaign, as well as a shocking US study that showed a serious lack of knowledge among so-called Generation Z, 48% of whom could not name a single concentration camp., has prompted social media giants Facebook and Twitter to announce last week that both platforms will ban posts denying the Holocaust, in line with their respective rules on violating hateful conduct policy.
While this is a very important step, US Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism Elan Carr argues that social media is rife with "raw hate" against Jews and will probably remain as such in the foreseeable future.
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Carr, who was named as the Trump administration's special envoy on anti-Semitism in February 2019, told JNS that there is only so much that the federal government can do to curb online posts.
"Obviously, a portion of online anti-Semitism rises to the level of crime, and, of course, that should be addressed and addressed aggressively. But the vast majority of online hate is protected by the First Amendment, so the government can't go after protected speech nor should it," he said.
Asked whether a free-market approach could better combat anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism on social-media sites, Carr said, "Competition is always a good thing, and certainly, the government has expressed that view specifically in the context of the social-media platforms.
"At the end of the day, you've got some bad actors who are spouting hate on the Internet. One can decide to regulate this or that platform, but at the end of the day, we've got to go to the source of the problem. The source of the problem is people hold despicable views. The First Amendment protects despicable views, but it doesn't mean we can't condemn them or call them out. I think that is absolutely critical.
"One of the things I think is fundamentally important is that the social-media platforms adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. They haven't done that yet. We've encouraged it publicly and privately. We will continue to push them to do that publicly or privately because I think it's incredibly important.
"You can't confront a threat unless you define the threat. We have a widely accepted vehicle that defines that threat. The State Department uses the IHRA definition. US President [Donald] Trump issued an executive order that employs the definition for the federal government at large. I think the social-media platforms ought to adopt it and use it as a tool.
"This is a tool not of censorship, but a tool of education. We want to deal with the haters by meeting their speech with, first of all, condemnation, and second of all, education."
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Asked which platforms specifically are not willing to combat anti-Semitism, Carr said, "I don't want to name names. Obviously, there's a deep web. We focus a lot on social media and rightfully so.
"On Twitter and Facebook alone, 1.7 million anti-Semitic posts were made in the first eight months of this year. I was shocked by the kind of things that are said openly and notoriously on these fringe deep-web platforms, so I absolutely think there's a very, very big problem. This is just raw hate that is being spewed, and it's dangerous. There are real effects to this."
The full interview with US Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism Elan Carr appeared on JNS.org.
