February 26, Campaign –
Arab Centre for Social Media Development issued a new comprehensive report entitled “Racism and Incitement Index for 2023”, the report highlights the increasing spread of hate speech and incitement to violence directed against Palestinians and defenders of Palestinian rights during 2023. The report provides an important insight into the seriousness of the digital rights situation and makes practical recommendations to combat the spread of harmful content of concern.
The documentation efforts carried out by the Campaign Centre over the past year revealed a worrying rise in hate speech and incitement to violence in Hebrew targeting Palestinians through social media platforms, and the results of the first half of 2023 revealed the widespread spread that translated into real harm on the ground, as evidenced by the violent attack on the village of Hawara and its residents on February 26. The second half of 2023 witnessed an unprecedented increase in these speeches, in addition to the discourses of enshrining violence, justifying collective punishment, and the exacerbating of the dehumanization of the Palestinian people, especially after the war on Gaza after October 7. Through the efforts of the campaign center, it was found to publish an average of 23 violent or hate content against Palestinians in every minute in the period after the seventh of October. Many of the authors of this harmful content have expressed positive feelings about the violent content they share, without any sense of guilt, shame, exhaustion or sadness.
Launched in October, the Violence Index Campaign Centre — an artificial intelligence-based language model that monitors hate speech and incitement to violence in Hebrew on social media platforms against Palestinians, and displays data in real-time on Hamah Centre’s platform, the Palestinian Observatory for Digital Rights Violations. The Violence Index monitored more than 10 million cases of harmful Hebrew-language content that spread across social media platforms during 2023, most of which were focussed on X (formerly Twitter).
The report also draws attention to the alarming prevalence of digital violations, with data provided by the Free-Palestinian Observatory for Digital Rights Violations revealing 4,400 digital rights violations, of which 2,749 were hate speeches and incitement to violence during 2023.
In its report, Hamaa Centre addressed a set of important recommendations to social media companies to combat hate speech and incitement to violence in Hebrew in real time, including developing effective Hebrew language classifiers, strengthening their cadres to address cases of hate speech and incitement to violence, increasing the number of Hebrew and Arabic content reviewers from their mother tongues, and involving civil society in the design of their policies and processes related to negative and illegal content on the Internet.
The Campaign Centre emphasises the urgent need for immediate and decisive action to address the high incidence of hate speech and incitement to violence on social media platforms against Palestinians, and by implementing the recommendations in the report, social media companies can play their part in protecting human rights, promoting accountability, and preventing the dissemination of harmful content on their platforms around the world. To read the full report, you can access it by visiting Campaign – Arab Centre for the Development of Social Media.