A group of 20,000 Israelis are suing Facebook for allegedly “connecting inciters to terrorists”.
The class-action lawsuit, filed in New York on Monday, accuses the social media company of ignoring large numbers of Palestinian posts calling for attacks on Jews, JTA reports.
The Israeli plaintiffs claim that “Facebook’s algorithms and platform connects inciters to terrorists who are further encouraged to perpetrate stabbings and other violence attacks against Israelis.”
According to a press release issued by the group behind the lawsuit, many recent assailants “were motivated to commit their heinous crimes by incitement to murder they read on Facebook — demagogues and leaders exhorting their followers to ‘slaughter the Jews,’ and offering instruction as to the best manner to do so, including even anatomical charts showing the best places to stab a human being.”
The suit claims that Facebook has a “legal and moral obligation” to block much of this content.
The plaintiffs are seeking an injunction against Facebook that would require the company to “immediately remove all pages, groups and posts containing incitement to murder Jews; to actively monitor its website for such incitement that all incitement is immediately removed prior to being disseminated to masses of terrorists and would-be terrorists; and to cease serving as matchmaker between terrorists, terrorist organizations, and those who incite others to commit terrorism.”
Richard Lankin, 76, was shot and stabbed by Palestinian terrorists while travelling on a Jerusalem bus on October 13 and had been the lead plaintiff, but died of his wounds on Tuesday. Two other Israelis were killed and more than 20 were wounded in the attack.
Three attorneys — Robert Tolchin of New York; Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, the director of the Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center, and Asher Perlin of Fort Lauderdale, Florida — filed the suit.
