Anti-Semitic posts on social media every 83 seconds

If one believes that the claim of Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan that stern action initiated by the government against nefarious social media activists found guilty of uploading blasphemous content against highly-revered personalities has reduced the online posting frequency of such material on social networking websites, it can be termed a fairly significant achievement by the PML-N government.

The achievement of the incumbent Nawaz government becomes even more noticeable if one takes into account the fact that the whole of West and the United States are struggling to curb online posts against Jews. In 2016, anti-Semitic posts were found uploaded to social media 43.6 times per hour or every 83 seconds despite all sorts of laws in place. Quite recently, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and an Israeli monitoring firm - Messrs Vigo Social Intelligence  - had examined millions of 2016 online posts, only to find that Twitter was by far most hate speech-filled network, adding more than 382,000 anti-Semitic posts were uploaded to social media over the course of 2016, which meant that 1,046 such posts were posted each day.

France, which has Europe’s largest Jewish population, estimated at between 500,000 and 600,000 individuals, has suffered from a significant increase in the number of anti-Jewish hate crimes from 2012 and 2016, something that had prompted the Interior Ministry of the French government and the Jewish Community Security Service to collect data on anti-Jewish acts in France. World Jewish Congress CEO and Executive Vice President Robert Singer was quoted as saying: "We knew that anti-Semitism online was on the rise, but the numbers revealed in this report give us concrete data as to how alarming the situation really is! We hope this serves as a wake-up call to all internet forums to maintain moral standards, rid themselves of offensive content and make the digital world a safer place for all."

Anti-Semitism is hostility, prejudice or discrimination directed against Jews as a group. It is imperative to note that making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing or stereotypical allegations about Jews is considered a serious offence in the developed West.

In at least 16 European countries, "Holocaust Denial" is a serious crime, and anybody who publicly denies that the actual number of Jews killed was significantly lower than the historically accepted figure of 5 to 6 million can be held culpable. Holocaust denial is the act of denying the systematic genocidal killings of millions of ethnic groups in Europe by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany during World War II especially. In its March 24, 2017 edition, the Times of Israel — a widely-followed Israeli news website with a 2017 readership of 3.5 million unique monthly users, had stated: "Posts with anti-Semitic content are uploaded to social media on an average of 43 times per hour, or every 83 seconds, according to a new study by the World Jewish Congress, an excerpt of which was released on March 23. In a joint research project with the Israeli monitoring firm Vigo Social Intelligence, the WJC analyzed millions of posts uploaded in 2016 in 20 languages on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, blogs and other forums."

The top Israeli media house had added: "More than 382,000 of the posts were found to have been anti-Semitic. Posts critical of Israel or its policies were not included in the study. The study found that a majority, some 63 per cent, of all anti-Semitic content online can be found on Twitter. Blogs made up 16 per cent, Facebook 11 per cent, Instagram 6 per cent, YouTube 2 per cent and another 2 per cent on the other forums. The WJC said the study identified the posts "through a database of searchable word phrases and terms online, then translated into leading languages and scanned through the Internet," after which "a representative sample was read and codified by analysts to refine searches and deepen qualitative analysis."

The Times of Israel had asserted: "A total of 7,600 posts were read in different languages, indicating a representative sample of 2 per cent of the total discourse included in the analysis," it said. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft in June signed a code of conduct with the European Commission that requires them to delete the majority of reported illegal hate speech within 24 hours. The signing of the accord was hailed as major progress towards reconciling US-based social networks’ adherence to American legislation despite demands by European governments and judiciaries that the firms limit themselves in Europe to the stricter laws on hate speech applied in much of the continent.