The following letter was submitted to The New York Times in response to "Free Speech Experts Argue Against Infowars Founder" (Aug. 8) To the Editor:
The debate over whether Alex Jones should have been removed from Facebook, Apple and other platforms seems almost quaint and academic when one looks closely at his long history of spreading outright lies and appeals to bigotry.
After the violent alt-right protest in Charlottesville, Va., a year ago, Mr. Jones announced that he…
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August 07, 2018 The Unite the Right anniversary rally will take place at 4:30pm on Sunday, August 12 in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C. Organizer Jason Kessler is promoting the event as a way to protest the “human rights abuses” he claims took place at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Despite his assurances that no “extreme elements” will be involved in the 2018 rally, Kessler has invited leaders from the alt right, as well as other…
July 26, 2018 By Samuel Woolley | Belfer Fellow with ADL's Center for Technology and Society
Computational propaganda — the use of automation and algorithms on social media to manipulate public opinion — has become a global phenomenon. This has come as a surprise to many in the technology sector, and it’s quite the adverse development given that less than a decade ago experts hailed social media as a savior for democratic communication. Russian…
June 25, 2018 By Karen Schrier | Belfer Fellow with ADL's Center for Technology and Society
Can games be used to support positive social change, connectedness, and caring, and help reduce bias? These are the big questions I will be exploring over the next year as a Belfer Fellow with ADL’s Center for Technology and Society. There are many questions in this area that need to be answered, but here are a few initial insights:
Games may support empathy — but there are…
June 19, 2018 The Council of Conservative Citizens, a once-prominent white supremacist group that has been dormant for several years, reemerged to hold the “Nationalist Solutions” conference June 15-17 in Burns, Tennessee. The event was a joint effort with the California-based white supremacist group American Freedom Party (AFP).
The conference, which took place in Montgomery Bell State Park, attracted roughly 70 attendees and speakers. The two-day event featured a…
June 08, 2018 When Patrick Little’s anti-Semitic campaign run for Dianne Feinstein’s U.S. Senate seat ended in a crushing defeat, he cried foul, while some among his white supremacist supporters have responded with talk of revolution, violence, and the need for white supremacist candidates to focus on areas of the country with a white majority. Little won about 1.4 percent of the vote, or roughly 61,000 votes, according to initial counts.
In a post-election livestream,…
Table Talk: Family Conversations about Current Events For Parents, Families, and Caregivers Topic SummaryIt seems like we are seeing more and more news and social media stories about people experiencing bias as they go about their daily lives—riding the subway, shopping in a store, dining in a restaurant and hanging out with friends. Indeed, the surge of such stories makes it seem like racism, sexism, antisemitism and other forms of bias and discrimination are becoming more pervasive…
June 01, 2018 In his first major public speaking appearance since February 2018, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan delivered a nearly three-hour sermon filled with attacks on Jews and Judaism from his pulpit at Mosque Maryam in Chicago on Sunday, May 27.
Warning his audience about “Satanic Jews who have infected the whole world with poison and deceit,” Farrakhan distorted passages from ancient Jewish religious texts in order to justify his conspiratorial and vile rhetoric…
May 18, 2018 By Oren Segal | Director of the Center on Extremism
Supporters of Patrick Little’s campaign for Dianne Feinstein’s U.S. Senate seat have taken up a disturbing new tactic: virulently anti-Semitic robocalls.
Little, an unabashed anti-Semite and racist who attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, is polling at around 18%, well behind Feinstein in California’s party-blind June 5th…
ADL's Center for Technology and Society's new and innovative work to fight hate and bias in games and emerging media.
New York, NY, May 16, 2018 … The Anti-Defamation League released a statement today after Twitter shared the results of a new approach it has taken since March to reduce the amount of abuse on the platform.
The following is a statement from Brittan Heller, Director of ADL’s Center for Technology and Society:
“Twitter's new approach to disruptive and harassing tweets is a promising and important step in addressing hate online. It is especially so in terms of how it…
By Brittan Heller | Director for Technology and Society May 02, 2018 WIRED When he testified before Congress last month, FacebookCEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed the problem of using artificial intelligence to identify online hate speech. He said he was optimistic that in five to 10 years, “We will have AI tools that can get into some of the linguistic nuances of different types of content to be more accurate in flagging content for our systems, but today we&rsquo…
January 10, 2018 By Brittan Heller | Director of the Center for Technology and Society & Aaron Sussman | Associate National Civil Rights Counsel
It was a hoax turned deadly. On the evening of December 28, a distressed-sounding man called the police in Wichita, Kansas, and confessed that he had shot his father in the head, was holding his mother and sibling hostage, and had poured gasoline in the house, threatening to set it on fire. He then gave the police his address.
…
December 19, 2017 Following Monday's implementation of new safety rules on Twitter, a number of users associated with white supremacy and other hateful ideologies found themselves no longer allowed on the platform.
"ADL commends Twitter for taking these significant steps to tackle hate on their platform. We long urged Twitter to push back against hateful and violent rhetoric, and these latest actions are encouraging," CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. …
December 08, 2017 All online platforms with user-generated content struggle with how best to moderate that content.The stakes are especially high when the platform is exclusively aimed at young children.
This is something YouTube, whose parent company Google is part of ADL’s Problem-Solving Lab, learned in a particularly disturbing way, as the young viewers of its popular YouTube Kids app were suddenly exposed to videos of their favorite characters suffering grisly deaths,…
November 27, 2017 By Mark Pitcavage, Senior Research Fellow for the Center on Extremism
Many subjects are difficult to report on, but extremist and fringe movements are particularly difficult landscapes for journalists to navigate, strewn with rough terrain and the occasional landmine. As someone who has monitored right-wing extremism for more than two decades, I’ve had the pleasure of reading many fine works of journalism on extremist-related subjects, but I’ve also seen…
Remarks by Jonathan A. Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League November 13, 2017 San Francisco, CA, November 13, 2017
Good morning everyone. Thank you for being here. I am grateful that you have all joined us this morning.
At the ADL, we’ve been fighting the scourge of anti-Semitism for more than 100 years. But until last year, we hadn’t created an open venue for dialogue about the issue, and so we launched the Never Is Now! conference last November. And as it…
October 20, 2017 Recently, a video game designer was working on a multiplayer first-person shooter game at a small studio. Others in the company were building battle maps, weapons, and different avatars — but she was the only person to raise her hand and say, "What are we doing to make sure that folks who are playing this game online aren't being totally awful to each other?"
She decided to create community guidelines, looking at lists of hateful words to determine which words could…
March 01, 2019 The Topeka, Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) has a well-earned reputation as one of America's most reviled hate groups. The small, virulently homophobic group stages vitriolic, highly visible protests nationwide against groups and individuals they’ve identified as supporters of “homosexuality,” or who otherwise subvert what they refer to as “God’s law.”
Through outrageous statements and postings on their various websites, the…
Teach students about why slurs are and why they are harmful, helping them explore possible responses to slurs when they hear them.