A sting that exposed Facebook’s liberal bias

Facebook’s anti-conservative bias takes many forms. Polls show that the more conservative a person’s politics, the more pro-Israel he tends to be. The opposite is also true: The more liberal one is, the more he tend to be anti-Israel (like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton).

In 2015 a non-profit organization ran a “sting”operation using Facebook member pages to see if the rumors about the site taking the liberal/anti-Israel stance was true.

Israeli non-profit organization Shurat HaDin (Israel Law Center) is leading a class-action lawsuit  against Facebook because it contends the site supports terrorism by refusing to remove anti-Israel hate sites per its community standards. Over 20,000 people have joined the suit.

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

To test its theory, The Israel Law Center launched two separate hate sites on Facebook, one anti-Jewish, the other anti-Palestinian. Each post on the two pages was put up at the same time on the same day. The hate posts were similar in sentiment and language; the only difference was the target.

After a few posts, they increased the hatred and antagonism of the posts, using phrases such as “blood and fire to demolish the zionist invaders” on one and “soldiers in the Israeli army knows there is a need to destroy the Arab enemy.” After a few days, the posts on the anti-Jewish site called for death to Jews and, on the anti-Palestinian page, the death of Arabs.

The hate posts continued to worsen until, finally, they simultaneously reported each site as hate pages to Facebook.

On the very same day that the complaints were lodged, Facebook closed the anti-Palestinian page, emailing back to the “person” who complained:

We reviewed the page you reported for containing credible threat of violence and found it violates our Community Standards.

The page inciting violence against Jews, which used the same hate terms as the anti-Palestinian one, was not closed by Facebook. The person filing a complaint received a message stating that calling for the death of Jews is not in violation of their rules.

Only after the Israel Law Center published the video that follows did Facebook change its mind. “As you may have noticed, we have now taken down both those pages as we made a mistake earlier,” a Facebook spokesperson explained in an email to the Law Center.

Sure, just like most liberal organizations, when Facebook gets caught red-handed, it tries to clean up its mess. Or to paraphrase a line uttered by Big Daddy in the classic play “Cat on a Hat Tin Roof”:

 Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this email from Facebook?… There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity… You can smell it. It smells like death.

Cross-posted at The Lid

Jeff Dunetz

Jeff Dunetz

Jeff Dunetz is editor and publisher of the The Lid, and a weekly political columnist for the Jewish Star and TruthRevolt. He has also contributed to Breitbart.com, HotAir, and PJ Media’s Tattler.

Comments

For your convenience, you may leave commments below using Disqus. If Disqus is not appearing for you, please disable AdBlock to leave a comment.