The offices of New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy acknowledged Facebook’s action against the page, “Rise Up Ocean County, “in a joint announcement Wednesday .
State officials first expressed concern to Facebook about the page in a letter sent ten months ago, they write. “Since then, we’ve consistently and repeatedly made clear our view that the page appeared to violate Facebook’s terms of service, and we appreciate that Facebook has now decided that this kind of hateful rhetoric has no place on its platform.”
Local media earlier this year described the page as “a platform ostensibly about growth in Lakewood and surrounding towns, but often targeting Jewish newcomers at the center of the community change . ” Municipal leaders began denouncing the group a year ago , and the NJ attorney general’s office sent Facebook a letter about it in April.
“There is a rising tide of hate around our country and around our state,” Rachel Wainer Apter, head of the state’s Division on Civil Rights, said in the letter. “You at Facebook also have a role to play in monitoring comments that incite violence based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, ancestry, and disability.”
In January the Facebook page went briefly offline , leading state officials to believe Facebook had in fact taken it down, but the group came back several hours later, “gloating “about its perseverance. Its current demise, however, appears to be sticking.
From online hate to offline action
Reported incidents of hate crime within New Jersey have risen every year since , according to an FBI report . Residents reported (such incidents in) (the most recent year for which data is available), including about 561 in which someone was targeted for a crime due to their religion.
Some of those crimes have proven deadly. In December, two shooters targeted a kosher market in Jersey City, killing three. The attackers, who also died at the scene, reportedly had a history of sharing anti-Semitic posts on Facebook.
The Internet era makes all communication easier, of course — including communication among bigots, extremists, and terrorists. Sites such as the partially departed 8chan specialize in being hate speech free-for-alls, but theoretically family-friendly Facebook is far from immune. The site came under international criticism following the March mass shooting at a mosque in New Zealand, which was streamed live on Facebook , then uploaded several million times after the fact.
Facebook has made several attempts to tamp down hate speech on its platform since, with decidedly mixed results. Speech from politicians and other newsworthy figures, who arguably help set the tone for everyone else’s discourse, is exempt from Facebook’s “community standards.” Meanwhile, the logistics of applying those standards in any reasonable and coherent way — across 2.5 billion worldwide monthly active users who share trillions of posts and photos — remain challenging at best.
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