Fighting Hate Through SWC's Digital Hate and Terrorism Project

 

The following was submitted today by Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. 

The surge of anti-Semitism, the rants of Jew-hating bigots, the verbal and physical assaults on pro-Israel students and professors tainting university campuses, the terrorist attacks striking the US, Turkey, Istanbul, France, Israel, Belgium and across the Middle East ...

So much of this hate and terror is supercharged by social media, which is used to incite, propagandize and recruit young people to violence, hate and terrorism. 

The Center’s Digital Terrorism and Hate project, has been a trailblazer in identifying this phenomenon and fighting against this dangerous abuse of technology for 21 years. We brief officials on every continent, train law enforcement in the Americas and have presented on the issue at NATO headquarters, the EU, in Paris, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Singapore, New Delhi and across North America, sharing our unique expertise as global leaders in battling sophisticated high tech bigotry.

Center officials monitor, grade and directly lobby the social media companies in the Silicon Valley including Facebook (pictured), Google/YouTube and others to push them to do more to degrade the marketing capabilities of ISIS and al Qaeda to remove hate, including anti-Semitism from their platforms. Our direct interaction with Twitter executives helped push the social media giant to begin to remove more than 125,000 accounts that promoted terrorism. 

The Center’s annual Digital Terrorism and Hate project also:

Has been reviewed by U.S. Congress and other elected officials in the Americas, Europe and Asia and helps train law enforcement, intelligence, and community activists globally.

Launched a password-sensitive smartphone app for law enforcement that enables instant access to our expert researchers. 

Releases an annual report card reflecting the commitment (or lack thereof) of social media giants to curb online terror and hate.

Gives young people an easy way to report anti-Semitism and hate through two apps: CombatHate for high school students and CombatHateU for university students. 

Works on five continents at the forefront of this issue, regularly holding high-level training around the U.S., helping law enforcement officials, Homeland Security officials, religious leaders, community leaders and the media to understand the challenges we face online.

To be effective we must expand our Internet capabilities, monitoring, including social media, in tracking the abuse of emerging technologies by haters and extremists, raising the alarm and building out new coalitions to defeat the evildoers.