ADL Statement on Twitter's Report That it Has Curbed Abuse on Platform
Press Release
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…
Table Talk: Family Conversations about Current Events For Parents, Families, and Caregivers Topic SummaryIn 1983, a social scientist named David Chambers published a research study on children’s drawings. The study gathered information from the late 1960s and 1970s in which teachers asked 5,000 children (in three different countries) to “draw a scientist.” One pattern appeared strongly: almost all of the scientist drawings depicted men. Through the study, Chambers was able to…
What Mark Zuckerberg Gets Wrong - and Right - About Hate Speech
News
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…
By Rejecting Jews, Intersectionality Betrays Itself
News
By Sharon Nazarian | Senior Vice President for International Affairs January 25, 2018 The Forward Last week, American Zionists were told they could not be part of the feminist movement — again.
A number of pro-Palestinian groups, most notably the Palestinian American Women’s Association, boycotted Saturday’s L.A. Women’s March. They wouldn’t attend due to the fact that actress Scarlett Johansson, known to be a proud Zionist, was one of the speakers.
Hardly…
No Longer Just a Prank: "Swatting" Incident Turns Deadly in Kansas
Article
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.
…
So-Called "Twitter Purge" Deletes Accounts of Prominent White Supremacists, Hate Groups
Article
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. …
YouTube Takes Step Toward Embracing Human Moderation and Fighting Abuse
Article
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…
Opening Remarks: The ADL 'Never is Now!' Summit in San Francisco
News
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…
How the “OK” Symbol Became a Popular Trolling Gesture
Article
May 01, 2017 Updated: 9/5/18 Has the simple thumb-and-forefinger “OK” hand gesture become a common white supremacist hand sign? Not quite, but it has become a popular gesture used by people across several segments of the right and far right—including some actual white supremacists—who generally use it to trigger reactions, or what they would describe as “trolling the libs.” This is thanks to a 2017 hoax campaign started by members of the…
Explosive Growth of Hateful Memes and Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories Against Jared Kushner
Article
April 10, 2017 An online campaign of anti-Semitism has been directed at Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and advisor over the past week. It comes in the context of Trump’s removal of chief strategist Stephen Bannon from the National Security Council and reports about a feud between Bannon and Kushner as well as airstrikes in Syria in response to the chemical attack last week.
This campaign of anti-Semitism has been driven by white supremacists and anti-Semites…
Google Must Do More to Pull the Plug on Online Hate
News
March 31, 2017 The Forward By Brittan Heller
Director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Technology and Society
For years, the Anti-Defamation League has held the clear, unwavering stance that videos made by terrorists and hate groups have no place on the internet. Hate-filled videos mislead children, poison the online experience for everyone, and serve as an unfortunate, yet effective, tool to recruit new generations of violent extremists.
Now, ADL is seeing the impact…
Online Harassment: Extremists Ramp Up Trolling, Doxxing Efforts
Article
March 21, 2017 The irony was thick this week when a Massachusetts rabbi wrote a blog piece musing about the dangerous effects of online trolling, citing the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer as a prime perpetrator. A Daily Stormer writer immediately pounced, posting a story ridiculing the rabbi’s concern and encouraging readers to, yes, troll her via Twitter (he provided the rabbi’s handle) “to thank her for spreading degeneracy among the Jews, or for helping spread our fame…
Top 10 ADL #2016Highlights – #1: Never Is NOW! A Dynamic Summit on Anti-Semitism
Article
December 20, 2016
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As 2016 draws to a close, the Anti-Defamation League is counting down the major milestones we accomplished this year in the fight against hate. Here’s a look at some highlights of our work this year – bringing us that much closer to our goal of achieving a world without hate.
Alarmed by a year when anti-Semitism coursed through social media, anti-Semitic incidents rose and Jewish stereotypes appeared…
ADL Alerts Service Providers to Hezbollah Presence on Their Platforms
Article
by: Oren Segal May 20, 2016
UPDATE: 5/20/16 - Facebook & Instagram have removed the accounts identified in this blog.
Al-Manar, the media wing of Hezbollah, has long broadcast terrorist propaganda disguised as news to the Arab speaking world. After being dropped by two of the largest satellite providers in the Arabic speaking world, ArabSat (which dropped the channel in December 2015) and NileSat (which dropped the channel in April 2016), Hezbollah is relying…
by: Oren Segal April 11, 2016 It’s April 12, 2016 — Equal Pay Day, the symbolic date that women need to work until to catch up with what men had earned by last Dec. 31. The fact is that women who work full time, are paid an average of 79 cents for every dollar paid to men — and on average, African American and Latina women are paid even less. It’s not a day to celebrate, but it is a teachable moment to focus on the needless, costly, and discriminatory gender wage…
August 01, 2012 William Porter “Billy” Payne Chairman Augusta National Golf Club 2604 Washington Road Augusta, GA 30904 Dear Mr. Payne:
We write to join the chorus of voices objecting to Augusta National Golf Club’s adherence to its policy of excluding women from its membership.
As a civil rights and human relations agency, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry and prejudice. For nearly 100 years…