Israel Has Asked Meta And TikTok To Remove 8,000 Posts Related To Hamas War
Israel says its takedown requests to social media companies have increased 10-fold since the start of the war. Ninety-four percent of the content was removed.
Thomas BrewsterNov 14, 2023,
Social media companies are having to deal with a massive influx of takedown requests around the Israel-Hamas war.
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Meta and TikTok have received over 8,000 requests from Israel to remove content related to the Hamas conflict that they allege violate the companies’ policies, according to the Israeli state prosecutor’s office. The agency says 94% of the content across major social sites that it flagged has been taken down.
Israel’s prosecutor’s office said it had requested the removal of content that incited violence and terrorism, as well as any promotion of groups widely designated as terrorists, including Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. It also asked that several songs praising Hamas that “served as soundtracks for thousands of videos on TikTok,” be taken down. TikTok, which told Forbes its policy was to remove all pro-Hamas content as soon as it’s identified, removed the videos playing the songs.
Policies for moderating violative content differ across platforms, but Google, TikTok and Facebook all ban material that promotes or is produced by terror groups, including Hamas, which has been designated as such by the U.S. government. Violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on ethnicity, nationality, race or religion are also banned.
“There is a significant challenge with Telegram’s cooperation.”
Hadar Katz, spokesperson for Israel’s state prosecutor’s office
Nearly 60% of 9,500 total content takedown requests from the prosecutor’s office to major social sites were to Facebook and Instagram’s parent company. That was compared to 26% to TikTok, according to data provided by the agency. Ten percent of those requests were directed at X, formerly known as Twitter; requests sent to YouTube and Telegram both fell under 5%. The government agency told Forbes that its takedown requests to all the social media giants has increased by 10-fold since the Hamas attacks.
Israel’s prosecutor’s office told Forbes that Telegram, which was used by Hamas-linked accounts to share gruesome footage from the October 7 attacks and the subsequent war, does not appear to have complied its requests. “There is a significant challenge with their cooperation,” said Hadar Katz, a spokesperson for the office.
Meta, Telegram and Twitter hadn’t responded to requests for comment at the time of publication. But Google’s YouTube said it had seen an influx of violative content on the platform since the war began. “Following the terrorist attacks by Hamas in Israel and the escalated conflict now underway in Israel and Gaza, we have removed tens of thousands of harmful videos and terminated hundreds of channels,” spokesperson Sarah Colvin-Rowley added.
Tech companies regularly receive demands from governments to remove material. In its most recent transparency report, TikTok reported it had received nearly 2,300 requests in the second half of 2022, 82 of which were from Israel, compared to just 11 from the U.S. and 335 from Russia. Google, meanwhile, received 60,000 requests in the first half of 2023, 223 from Israel, 359 from the U.S., and a massive 36,000 from Russia. Meta doesn’t release information on removal requests.
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