Social media, including Facebook, must proactively block content inciting hatred and prevent online campaigns which target minorities, such as those undertaken in Myanmar, the United Nations human rights chief said on Wednesday.

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, was speaking after U.N. experts accused Myanmar generals of “genocidal intent” and said Facebook had allowed its platform to be used to incite violence against Rohingya.

Facebook said on Monday it was removing several Myanmar military officials from the social media website and an Instagram account to prevent the spread of “hate and misinformation” after reviewing the content.

Zeid, whose spokesman said he has met with major tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Facebook and Google, in recent months, was speaking to a news conference before his four-year term ends on Aug. 31.

Zeid said he didn’t feel Facebook took the issue seriously at first but that the company’s attitude began to change after Yanghee Lee, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, told a Geneva press conference in March that Facebook was being used in the country to spread hate speech.

“But it shouldn’t be because the press or the human rights community highlights the problem for them then suddenly to respond. They should be aware of it ahead of time,” he said.

“So I don’t think they should wait until the crisis begins. They should be thinking proactively about what steps they will take to mitigate that,” he added.

Facebook said on Monday that while it was too slow to act in the case of Myanmar, it was now making progress, with better technology to identify hate speech and improved reporting tools.

However, Zeid said there was a danger that social media could be over-regulated in a way that breaches human rights law including the right to freedom of expression.

Tech giants should “keep the broadest space available and open to the exercise of freedom of expression”, relying on international human rights law for regulation, he said.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused Google’s search engine of promoting negative news articles and hiding “fair media” coverage of him, vowing to address the situation without providing evidence or giving details of action he might take.

Trump’s attack against the Alphabet Inc. unit follows a string of grievances against technology companies, including Twitter Inc and Facebook, which he has accused of silencing conservative voices.

In April, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told U.S. senators that the social media site was hiring dozens more Burmese speakers to review hate speech posted in Myanmar. The situation was dire.

Some 700,000 members of the Rohingya community had recently fled the country amid a military crackdown and ethnic violence. In March, a United Nations investigator said Facebook was used to incite violence and hatred against the Muslim minority group. The platform, she said, had “turned into a beast.”

Four months after Zuckerberg’s pledge to act, here is a sampling of posts from Myanmar that were viewable this month on Facebook:

One user posted a restaurant advertisement featuring Rohingya-style food. “We must fight them the way Hitler did the Jews, damn kalars!” the person wrote, using a pejorative for the Rohingya. That post went up in December 2013.

Another post showed a news article from an army-controlled publication about attacks on police stations by Rohingya militants. “These non-human kalar dogs, the Bengalis, are killing and destroying our land, our water and our ethnic people,” the user wrote. “We need to destroy their race.” That post went up last September, as the violence against the Rohingya peaked.

A third user shared a blog item that pictures a boatload of Rohingya refugees landing in Indonesia. “Pour fuel and set fire so that they can meet Allah faster,” a commenter wrote. The post appeared 11 days after Zuckerberg’s Senate testimony.

The remarks are among more than 1,000 examples Reuters found of posts, comments, images and videos attacking the Rohingya or other Myanmar Muslims that were on Facebook as of last week. Almost all are in the main local language, Burmese. The anti-Rohingya and anti-Muslim invective analysed for this article – which was collected by Reuters and the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law – includes material that’s been up on Facebook for as long as six years.

The poisonous posts call the Rohingya or other Muslims dogs, maggots and rapists, suggest they be fed to pigs, and urge they be shot or exterminated. The material also includes crudely pornographic anti-Muslim images. The company’s rules specifically prohibit attacking ethnic groups with “violent or dehumanising speech” or comparing them to animals. Facebook also has long had a strict policy against pornographic content.

The use of Facebook to spread hate speech against the Rohingya in the Buddhist-majority country has been widely reported by the U.N. and others. Now, a Reuters investigation gives an inside look at why the company has failed to stop the problem.

For years, Facebook – which reported net income of $15.9 billion (£12.5 billion) in 2017 – devoted scant resources to combat hate speech in Myanmar, a market it dominates and in which there have been regular outbreaks of ethnic violence. In early 2015, there were only two people at Facebook who could speak Burmese reviewing problematic posts. Before that, most of the people reviewing Burmese content spoke English.

To this day, the company continues to rely heavily on users reporting hate speech in part because its systems struggle to interpret Burmese text.

Even now, Facebook doesn’t have a single employee in the country of some 50 million people. Instead, it monitors hate speech from abroad. This is mainly done through a secretive operation in Kuala Lumpur that’s outsourced to Accenture, the professional services firm, and codenamed “Project Honey Badger.”

According to people familiar with the matter, the project, which handles many Asian countries, hired its first two Burmese speakers, who were based in Manila, just three years ago. As of June, Honey Badger had about 60 people reviewing reports of hate speech and other content posted by Myanmar’s 18 million active Facebook users. Facebook itself in April had three full-time Burmese speakers at a separate monitoring operation at its international headquarters in Dublin, according to a former employee.

Honey Badger employees typically sign one-year renewable contracts and agree not to divulge that the client is Facebook. Reuters interviewed more than a half-dozen former monitors who reviewed Southeast Asian content.

A Facebook official said outsourcing its content monitoring is more efficient because the companies it uses are specialists in ramping up such operations. He declined to disclose how many Burmese speakers the company has on the job worldwide, saying it was “impossible to know, to be definitive on that.”

“It’s not enough,” he added.

For many people in this emerging economy, Facebook is the internet: It’s so dominant, it’s the only site they use online. Yet, the company ignored repeated warnings as far back as 2013 that it faced trouble.

Researchers and human rights activists say they cautioned Facebook for years that its platform was being used in Myanmar to promote racism and hatred of Muslims, in particular the Rohingya.

“They were warned so many times,” said David Madden, a tech entrepreneur who worked in Myanmar. He said he told Facebook officials in 2015 that its platform was being exploited to foment hatred in a talk he gave at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. About a dozen Facebook people attended the meeting in person, including Mia Garlick, now the company’s director of Asia Pacific policy, he said. Others joined via video. “It couldn’t have been presented to them more clearly, and they didn’t take the necessary steps,” Madden said.

In a statement, Garlick told Reuters: “We were too slow to respond to the concerns raised by civil society, academics and other groups in Myanmar. We don’t want Facebook to be used to spread hatred and incite violence. This is true around the world, but it is especially true in Myanmar where our services can be used to amplify hate or exacerbate harm against the Rohingya.”

She added that Facebook is focussed on addressing challenges that are unique to Myanmar “through a combination of people, technology, policies and programs.” The company also said it has banned several “hate figures and organizations” on Facebook in Myanmar.

Facebook’s struggles in Myanmar are among much broader problems it faces. Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony in April primarily focussed on the company’s mishandling of user data, whether it censors conservative views and Russia’s exploitation of Facebook to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Of all of Facebook’s travails, though, Myanmar may be the bloodiest. The Myanmar military stands accused by the U.N. of having conducted a brutal campaign of killings, mass rape, arson and ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya. The government denies the allegations.

The social media giant doesn’t make public its data on hate speech in Myanmar. It says it has 2.2 billion global users and each week receives millions of user reports from around the world about problematic content.

In compiling examples of hate speech for this article, Reuters found some that Facebook subsequently removed. But the vast majority remained online as of early August.

After Reuters alerted Facebook to some of the derogatory posts included in this story, the company said it removed them. “All of it violated our policies,” it said.

Reuters itself sometimes flags to Facebook threats posted on the platform against its reporters. These include the Burmese journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who are on trial in Myanmar on charges of violating a state secrets law. The two were arrested in December while reporting on the massacre of 10 Rohingya men and have received a deluge of death threats on social media over their story. Facebook has removed such content several times at the news agency’s request.

‘SENDING FLOWERS’

Myanmar emerged from decades of military rule in 2011, but religious violence has marred its transition to democracy. In 2012, clashes in Rakhine State between ethnic Rakhine, who are Buddhists, and the Rohingya killed scores of people and left 140,000 displaced – mostly Muslims.

Facebook’s extraordinary dominance in Myanmar began taking root around the same time. But not by design.

As recently as six years ago, Myanmar was one of the least connected countries on earth. In 2012, only 1.1 percent of the population used the internet and few people had telephones, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency. The junta that had ruled the country for decades kept citizens isolated.

That all changed in 2013, when a quasi-civilian government oversaw the deregulation of telecommunications. The state-owned phone company suddenly faced competition from two foreign mobile-phone entrants from Norway and Qatar.

The price of SIM cards dropped from more than $200 to as little as $2 and people purchased them in droves. By 2016, nearly half the population had mobile phone subscriptions, according to GSMA Intelligence, the research arm of the industry’s trade association. Most purchased smartphones with internet access.

One app went viral: Facebook. Many saw it as an all-in-one solution – offering a messaging system, news, and videos and other entertainment. It also became a status symbol, said Chris Tun, a former Deloitte consultant who advised the government. “If you don’t use Facebook, you’re behind,” he said. “Even grandmas, everyone was on Facebook.”

To capture customers, Myanmar’s mobile phone operators began offering a sweet deal: use Facebook without paying any data charges.

“Facebook should be sending flowers to me, because we have been an accelerator for bringing the penetration,” said Lars Erik Tellmann, who until July was chief executive of Telenor Myanmar, part of Norway’s Telenor Group. “This was an initiative we took fully on our own. And this was extremely popular.”

In Myanmar today, the government itself uses Facebook to make major announcements, including the resignation of the president in March.

‘GENOCIDE ALL OF THE MUSLIMS’

In the fall of 2013, Aela Callan, an Australian documentary filmmaker studying at Stanford University, began a project on hate speech and false reports that had spread online during conflicts between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims the prior year. In June 2012, at least 80 people had died in riots and thousands of Rohingya were moved into squalid internment camps. Anti-Rohingya diatribes appeared on Facebook. One Buddhist nationalist group set up a page called the “Kalar Beheading Gang.”

In November 2013, she met at Facebook’s California headquarters with Elliott Schrage, Vice President of Communications and Public Policy. “I was trying to alert him to the problems,” she said.

Emails between the two show that Schrage put Callan in touch with internet.org, a Facebook initiative to bring the internet to developing countries, and with two Facebook officials, including one who worked with civil-society organizations to assist the company in coping with hate speech.

“He didn’t connect me to anyone inside Facebook who could deal with the actual problem,” she said.

Asked for comment, Schrage referred Reuters to a press person at Facebook. The company didn’t comment on the meeting.

Matt Schissler, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, said that between March and December 2014, he held discussions with Facebook officials in a series of calls and online communications. He told them how the platform was being used to spread hate speech and false rumours in Myanmar, he said, including via fake accounts. He and other activists provided the company with specific examples, including a Facebook page in Burmese that was called, “We will genocide all of the Muslims and feed them to the dogs.” The page was removed.

Schissler belonged to a private Facebook group that was set up so that Myanmar human rights activists, researchers and company employees such as Asia Pacific policy chief Garlick could discuss how to cope with hate speech and other issues. The activists brought up numerous problems with Facebook’s multi-step reporting system for problematic content. As one example, they cited a photograph of an aid worker in Rakhine State in a post that called him “a traitor to the nation.” It had been shared 229 times, according to messages reviewed by Reuters.

One of the private group’s members had reported it to Facebook as harassment of an individual but later received a message back: “We reviewed the photo you reported for containing hate speech or symbols and found it doesn’t violate our Community Standards.” After multiple complaints by activists over six weeks, a Facebook employee finally explained to the activists that the takedown request was rejected because the photo had been reported, but not the comment above it. It eventually was taken down.

In March 2015, Schissler gave a talk at Facebook’s California headquarters about new media, particularly Facebook, and anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar. More than a dozen Facebook employees attended, he said.

Two months later, Madden, the tech entrepreneur, gave a talk at Facebook headquarters about tensions and violence between Buddhists and Muslims. He said he showed a doctored picture that had spread on Facebook of the country’s de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who is Buddhist, wearing a Muslim head scarf. The image, Madden said, was meant to imply she was sympathetic to Muslims – a “very negative message” in Myanmar.

“The whole point of this presentation was really just to sound the alarm, to show very vividly the context in which Facebook was operating, and already the evidence of how it was being misused,” he said. He left the meeting thinking his audience took the talk seriously and would take action.

Madden had founded a technology hub and start-up accelerator in Yangon called Phandeeyar. He said he and others involved with the venture interacted with Facebook “many dozens” of times over the next several years, including via email, in the private Facebook group and in person, showing how the network’s systems for detecting and removing dangerous content were ineffective. He isn’t sure what steps the company took in response. “The central problem is that the mechanisms that they have to pull down hate speech in a timely way, before it does real world harm, they don’t work,” he said.

Madden and Jes Kaliebe Petersen, Phandeeyar’s chief executive, said Facebook was still relying too much on their group and other volunteers to report dangerous posts. “It shouldn’t be incumbent on an organisation like ours or people who happen to be well-connected with folks inside Facebook to report these things,” Petersen said.

In April, shortly before Zuckerberg’s Senate testimony, Phandeeyar and five other Myanmar groups blasted him for claiming in an interview with Vox that Facebook’s systems had detected and removed incendiary messages in September last year. “We believe your system, in this case, was us,” they wrote. Zuckerberg apologised.

Back in 2014, tech organizations and researchers weren’t the only ones sounding alarms with Facebook. So was the Myanmar government.

In July of that year, riots broke out in the central city of Mandalay after false rumours spread online, on Facebook and elsewhere, that a Muslim man had raped a Buddhist woman. A Buddhist man and a Muslim man were killed in the fighting.

The Myanmar government asked Tun, then a Deloitte consultant, to contact the company. He said he didn’t succeed at first, and the government briefly blocked Facebook.

Tun said he eventually helped to arrange meetings between the government and Facebook. “What they promised to do was, when you spot fake news, you could contact them via email,” Tun said of Facebook. “And they would take action – they were willing to take down pages after their own verification process.”

The government began reporting cases to Facebook, but Tun said he quickly realized the company couldn’t deal with Burmese text. “Honestly, Facebook had no clue about Burmese content. They were totally unprepared,” he said. “We had to translate it into English for them.”

‘I DON’T KNOW THE LANGUAGE’

In August 2013, Zuckerberg announced a plan to make the Internet available for the first time to billions of people in developing countries.

“Everything Facebook has done has been about giving all people around the world the power to connect,” he said. The company would now work, he added, to make “internet access available to those who cannot currently afford it.”

But in Myanmar, the language barrier would cause trouble. Most people here don’t speak English. Although Myanmar users at the time could post on Facebook in Burmese, the platform’s interface – including its system for reporting problematic posts – was in English.

Making matters worse, the company’s operation for monitoring content in Burmese was meagre.

In 2014, the social media behemoth had just one content reviewer who spoke Burmese: a local contractor in Dublin, according to messages sent by Facebook employees in the private Facebook chat group. A second Burmese speaker began working in early 2015, the messages show.

In Manila – the original site of the outsourced Project Honey Badger – there were no content reviewers who spoke Burmese. People who reviewed Myanmar content there spoke English.

“In cases like hate speech where we didn’t understand the language, we would say, ‘I don’t know the language,'” said a person who worked there. “So the client had to solve that,” the person said, referring to Facebook.

By 2015, Facebook had around four Burmese speakers reviewing Myanmar content in Manila and Dublin. They were stretched thin: that year Facebook had 7.3 million active users in Myanmar.

Accenture slowly began to hire more Burmese speakers. With the help of volunteer translators, Facebook also introduced a Burmese-language interface.

By 2016, the Honey Badger project had moved to Kuala Lumpur after Accenture convinced Facebook it would be easier to recruit Burmese and others to work in Malaysia’s capital than in further-off Manila, according to a person familiar with the matter.

In an office tower in Kuala Lumpur, teams of content monitors are assigned to handle different Asian countries, not just Myanmar. They are paid around $850 to $1000 a month and are often employed by temporary staffing agencies, according to ex-employees and online recruitment ads.

Facebook said in a statement: “We’ve chosen to work only with highly reputable, global partners that take care of their employees, pay them well and provide robust benefits – this includes Accenture in Asia Pacific.”

A spokesperson for Accenture confirmed it partners with Facebook. “The characterization of our operations as ‘secretive’ is misleading and confidentiality is in place primarily to protect the privacy and security of our people and the clients we serve,” the spokesperson said.

THE COMMUNICATIONS MAN

Former content monitors said they often each had to make judgements on 1,000 or more potentially problematic content items a day, although the number is now understood to be less.

Facebook’s complete rules about what is and isn’t allowed on its platform are spelled out in its internal community standards enforcement guidelines, which the company made public for the first time in April. It defines hate speech as “violent or dehumanising speech, statements of inferiority, or calls for exclusion or segregation” against people based on their race, ethnicity, religious affiliation and other characteristics.

In response, Facebook said: “Content reviewers aren’t required to evaluate any set number of posts … We encourage reviewers to take the time they need.”

A Facebook official also told Reuters the community standards policy is global, “but there are local nuances,” such as slurs, that content reviewers who are native speakers can consider when making decisions. But former content monitors told Reuters the rules were inconsistent; sometimes they could make exceptions and sometimes they couldn’t.

Former content monitors also said they were trained to err on the side of keeping content on Facebook. “Most of the time, you try to give the user the benefit of the doubt,” said one former Facebook employee.

The ex-monitors said they sometimes had as little as a few seconds to decide if a post constituted hate speech or violated Facebook’s community standards in some other way. They said they didn’t actually search for hate speech themselves; instead, they reviewed a giant queue of posts mostly reported by Facebook users.

Many of the millions of items flagged globally each week – including violent diatribes and lurid sexual imagery – are detected by automated systems, Facebook says. But a company official acknowledged to Reuters that its systems have difficulty interpreting Burmese script because of the way the fonts are often rendered on computer screens, making it difficult to identify racial slurs and other hate speech.

Facebook’s troubles are evident in a new feature that allows users to translate Burmese content into English. Consider a post Reuters found from August of last year.

In Burmese, the post says: “Kill all the kalars that you see in Myanmar; none of them should be left alive.”

Facebook’s translation into English: “I shouldn’t have a rainbow in Myanmar.”

In response, Facebook said: “Our translations team is actively working on new ways to ensure that translations are accurate.” The company said it uses a different system to detect hate speech.

Guy Rosen, vice president of product management, wrote in a blog post on Facebook in May about the problems the company faced in identifying hate speech. “Our technology still doesn’t work that well and so it needs to be checked by our review teams,” he wrote.

Facebook officials say they have no immediate plans to hire any employees in Myanmar itself. But the company does contract with local agencies for tasks unrelated to content monitoring. One is Echo Myanmar, a communications firm whose managing director is Anthony Larmon, an American.

Larmon has expressed strong opinions on the Rohingya. Toward the end of 2016, the Myanmar army launched an onslaught across some 10 villages after Rohingya militants attacked border posts. At the time, a U.N. official accused the government of seeking “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya.

In November 2016, Larmon wrote that an article about the U.N. allegation was “misleading.” He cited what he said were claims by multiple “local journalists” that the ethnic minority “purposely exaggerate (lie about)” their situation to “get more foreign aid and attention.”

He also wrote: “No, they aren’t facing ethnic cleansing or anything remotely close to what that incendiary term suggests.” He said he later removed the post.

A Facebook spokesperson said that Larmon’s post “does not represent Facebook’s view.”

Larmon told Reuters: “It was overly-emotional, under-informed commentary on a highly nuanced subject that I do regret. My view on the Rohingya, same today as then, is that they should be safely repatriated and protected.”

The platform on which he aired his views about the Rohingya? Facebook.

Facebook said it had deleted hundreds of offensive posts since a law banning online hate speech came into force in Germany at the start of the year that foresees fines of up to 50 million euros (51.53 million pounds) for failure to comply.

The social network received 1,704 complaints under the law, known in Germany as NetzDG, and removed 262 posts between January and June, Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice president for global policy solutions said in a blog.

“Hate speech is not allowed on Facebook,” Allan said, adding that the network had removed posts that attacked people who were vulnerable for reasons including ethnicity, nationality, religion or sexual orientation.

Complaints covered a range of alleged offences under Germany’s criminal code, including insult, defamation, incitement to hatred and incitement to crime, the report said. Of the posts that were blocked, the largest number was for insult.

Facebook is less popular in Germany than other European countries, with only around two in five internet users logging on each month, according to researchers eMarketer.

That’s in part due to collective memories of hate-filled propaganda that date back to Germany’s 20th century history of Nazi and Communist rule that don’t always sit well with Facebook’s broad view on freedom of speech.

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg faced criticism in Germany after saying in a recent interview that Facebook should not delete statements denying that the Holocaust happened – a crime in Germany. He later clarified his remarks.

Facebook has a dedicated team of 65 staff handling complaints under the NetzDG, Allan said, adding that this could be adjusted in line with the number of complaints.

From January to June, Facebook removed a total of around 2.5 million posts that violated its own community standards designed to prevent abusive behaviour on the platform.

“We have taken a very careful look at the German law,” Allan wrote in his blog, which was published in German.

“That’s why we are convinced that the overwhelming majority of content considered hate speech in Germany, would be removed if it were examined to see whether it violates our community standards.”

A lawmaker for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Tankred Schipanski, said the NetzDG law – which requires social platforms to remove offensive posts within 24 hours – was doing the job for which it was intended.

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Our growing presence on Facebook means our work reaches new audiences daily. This growth benefits our service users who may want to contact us about a case. Or appeal to individuals who remain concerned about anti-Muslim hate.

Growth allows for disagreement and a range of opinions. That is welcome. Hate speech is not.

We recently highlighted how Nazi ideology influences some to dehumanise Muslims in Britain. This generated a great deal of discussion. Some, however, ignored the crux of the article to suggest that Muslims are Nazis. Some compared Islam to Nazism. Others posted Holocaust denial and antisemitic hate speech.
Examples included:

‘muslims are new nazi’s’

‘nothing wrong with nazis‘

‘A bit like islam then‘

‘Still no proof that a single person Jew or Gentile was ever gassed by the Germans’

‘Holocaust did happen.. BUT not 6 million that’s a lie it’s been proven wrong’

‘ISIS are exactly like the Jews only apartheid fake state of Israel’

‘The Nazis waffen ss were the most culturally diverse army of its time. Hitlers respect for other races is well documented.’

‘Nice try K****, I can see right through tour lies. The National socialist party had no problems with other races, they wanted to abolish the corrupt Jewry that was ruining Germany’

‘the national socialists (NAZIs) were not racist’

As an organisation, we’ve always prided ourselves on speaking out against all forms of hate. It remains heartening that some individuals challenged this sort of hate speech.

Our dedicated staff cannot always monitor every comment posted on our Facebook. So we ask our supporters to stay vigilant and continue to challenge hate speech and report it when found.

Reporting hate speech to Facebook remains an easy task if you know how to do it. Make us aware of racist comments via email at info@tellmamauk.org or call us in confidence on 0800 456 1226.

Counter-speech can also be a powerful tool when confronting these abusive comments. It only takes a few working together to challenge online hate speech. Whether it’s reporting abuse or correcting willful distortion – your voice matters.

Together we can help counter those who abuse Facebook’s platform to spread hate.

Come join us online in saying #no2h8 as we extend our gratitude to those who made us aware of the above hate speech. The comments have been removed and reported.

The post Help us challenge hate speech on Facebook appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Our growing presence on Facebook means our work reaches new audiences daily. This growth benefits our service users who may want to contact us about a case. Or appeal to individuals who remain concerned about anti-Muslim hate.

Growth allows for disagreement and a range of opinions. That is welcome. Hate speech is not.

We recently highlighted how Nazi ideology influences some to dehumanise Muslims in Britain. This generated a great deal of discussion. Some, however, ignored the crux of the article to suggest that Muslims are Nazis. Some compared Islam to Nazism. Others posted Holocaust denial and antisemitic hate speech.
Examples included:

‘muslims are new nazi’s’

‘nothing wrong with nazis‘

‘A bit like islam then‘

‘Still no proof that a single person Jew or Gentile was ever gassed by the Germans’

‘Holocaust did happen.. BUT not 6 million that’s a lie it’s been proven wrong’

‘ISIS are exactly like the Jews only apartheid fake state of Israel’

‘The Nazis waffen ss were the most culturally diverse army of its time. Hitlers respect for other races is well documented.’

‘Nice try K****, I can see right through tour lies. The National socialist party had no problems with other races, they wanted to abolish the corrupt Jewry that was ruining Germany’

‘the national socialists (NAZIs) were not racist’

As an organisation, we’ve always prided ourselves on speaking out against all forms of hate. It remains heartening that some individuals challenged this sort of hate speech.

Our dedicated staff cannot always monitor every comment posted on our Facebook. So we ask our supporters to stay vigilant and continue to challenge hate speech and report it when found.

Reporting hate speech to Facebook remains an easy task if you know how to do it. Make us aware of racist comments via email at info@tellmamauk.org or call us in confidence on 0800 456 1226.

Counter-speech can also be a powerful tool when confronting these abusive comments. It only takes a few working together to challenge online hate speech. Whether it’s reporting abuse or correcting willful distortion – your voice matters.

Together we can help counter those who abuse Facebook’s platform to spread hate.

Come join us online in saying #no2h8 as we extend our gratitude to those who made us aware of the above hate speech. The comments have been removed and reported.

The post Help us challenge hate speech on Facebook appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Our growing presence on Facebook means our work reaches new audiences daily. This growth benefits our service users who may want to contact us about a case. Or appeal to individuals who remain concerned about anti-Muslim hate.

Growth allows for disagreement and a range of opinions. That is welcome. Hate speech is not.

We recently highlighted how Nazi ideology influences some to dehumanise Muslims in Britain. This generated a great deal of discussion. Some, however, ignored the crux of the article to suggest that Muslims are Nazis. Some compared Islam to Nazism. Others posted Holocaust denial and antisemitic hate speech.
Examples included:

‘muslims are new nazi’s’

‘nothing wrong with nazis‘

‘A bit like islam then‘

‘Still no proof that a single person Jew or Gentile was ever gassed by the Germans’

‘Holocaust did happen.. BUT not 6 million that’s a lie it’s been proven wrong’

‘ISIS are exactly like the Jews only apartheid fake state of Israel’

‘The Nazis waffen ss were the most culturally diverse army of its time. Hitlers respect for other races is well documented.’

‘Nice try K****, I can see right through tour lies. The National socialist party had no problems with other races, they wanted to abolish the corrupt Jewry that was ruining Germany’

‘the national socialists (NAZIs) were not racist’

As an organisation, we’ve always prided ourselves on speaking out against all forms of hate. It remains heartening that some individuals challenged this sort of hate speech.

Our dedicated staff cannot always monitor every comment posted on our Facebook. So we ask our supporters to stay vigilant and continue to challenge hate speech and report it when found.

Reporting hate speech to Facebook remains an easy task if you know how to do it. Make us aware of racist comments via email at info@tellmamauk.org or call us in confidence on 0800 456 1226.

Counter-speech can also be a powerful tool when confronting these abusive comments. It only takes a few working together to challenge online hate speech. Whether it’s reporting abuse or correcting willful distortion – your voice matters.

Together we can help counter those who abuse Facebook’s platform to spread hate.

Come join us online in saying #no2h8 as we extend our gratitude to those who made us aware of the above hate speech. The comments have been removed and reported.

The post Help us challenge hate speech on Facebook appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Our growing presence on Facebook means our work reaches new audiences daily. This growth benefits our service users who may want to contact us about a case. Or appeal to individuals who remain concerned about anti-Muslim hate.

Growth allows for disagreement and a range of opinions. That is welcome. Hate speech is not.

We recently highlighted how Nazi ideology influences some to dehumanise Muslims in Britain. This generated a great deal of discussion. Some, however, ignored the crux of the article to suggest that Muslims are Nazis. Some compared Islam to Nazism. Others posted Holocaust denial and antisemitic hate speech.
Examples included:

‘muslims are new nazi’s’

‘nothing wrong with nazis‘

‘A bit like islam then‘

‘Still no proof that a single person Jew or Gentile was ever gassed by the Germans’

‘Holocaust did happen.. BUT not 6 million that’s a lie it’s been proven wrong’

‘ISIS are exactly like the Jews only apartheid fake state of Israel’

‘The Nazis waffen ss were the most culturally diverse army of its time. Hitlers respect for other races is well documented.’

‘Nice try K****, I can see right through tour lies. The National socialist party had no problems with other races, they wanted to abolish the corrupt Jewry that was ruining Germany’

‘the national socialists (NAZIs) were not racist’

As an organisation, we’ve always prided ourselves on speaking out against all forms of hate. It remains heartening that some individuals challenged this sort of hate speech.

Our dedicated staff cannot always monitor every comment posted on our Facebook. So we ask our supporters to stay vigilant and continue to challenge hate speech and report it when found.

Reporting hate speech to Facebook remains an easy task if you know how to do it. Make us aware of racist comments via email at info@tellmamauk.org or call us in confidence on 0800 456 1226.

Counter-speech can also be a powerful tool when confronting these abusive comments. It only takes a few working together to challenge online hate speech. Whether it’s reporting abuse or correcting willful distortion – your voice matters.

Together we can help counter those who abuse Facebook’s platform to spread hate.

Come join us online in saying #no2h8 as we extend our gratitude to those who made us aware of the above hate speech. The comments have been removed and reported.

The post Help us challenge hate speech on Facebook appeared first on TELL MAMA.

This report looks at the impact of on-line and off-line experiences of anti-Muslim hostility on British Muslims in the UK. It highlights how some male Muslims are failing to report in Institutional anti-Muslim prejudice for fear of being targeted and for fear that they will be seen to be ‘weak’ in the eyes of their families and lead to instability in their employment. It also highlights how key ‘trigger’ events such as the murder of Lee Rigby, the actions of the so-called Islamic State and the Rotherham grooming scandal, have led to multiple impacts within Muslim communities. It also re-affirms the link between racist language and anti-Muslim prejudice, with one female respondent saying, “actually, 9 out of 10 times, the abuse I receive is based on race. Although they use religion because I am identifiable as a Muslim woman, the words that come out of their mouth have to do with race, so the race and the religion are tied up together in people’s minds.”

Participants in the report talk about the disturbing nature of verbal and physical violence that they have suffered. A convert to Islam, Sophie (who wears the Hijab) stated, “a guy walked past, he spat at me and called me a ‘Muzzi’. Also, I’ve been called dirty Paki, (I am white), as a group of guys walked past and shouted ‘speak English in our country.’ I was looking at a map and did not say anything.”

Some participants also warned about the risks of radicalisation, especially for young people as a result of suffering online and/or offline anti-Muslim hate crimes. One respondent, Hamza, noted that “anti-Muslim hate crime has affected Muslims. This is why Muslims are going to Syria. This is why they support ISIS. When people experience Islamophobic abuse, they will be easily radicalised. They feel weak, lonely, isolated, and rejected from British society. This is when these hate preachers pick them up and brainwash them. If you are constantly victimised, you are weak.”

This report also highlights an impact on Muslim communities which is rarely discussed and which includes changes in dress style so that attention is not drawn to the visibility of their faith. The report highlights the issue of Muslims managing their Muslim identity on-line and off-line with the aim of reducing future abuse. It states that, “the reality of anti-Muslim hate crime creates ‘invisible’ boundaries, across which members of the Muslim community are not ‘welcome’ to step. The enactment of both virtual and physical boundaries impacts upon ‘emotional geographies’ in relation to the way in which Muslims perceive the spaces and places around and outside their communities of abode. Rather than risk the threat of being attacked, either off-line or on-line, many actual and potential victims opt to change their lifestyles and retreat to ‘their own’ communities.

]]> 1227 https://www.faith-matters.org/after-the-fire-why-the-ahmadiyya-community-will-not-give-into-hate-by-rima-amin/ Fri, 02 Oct 2015 08:58:28 +0000 https://tellmamauk.org/?p=6479 Why Facebook must do more to challenge anti-Muslim hate posts, by Rima Amin “Love for All, Hatred for None” is the motto carried by the Ahmadiyya Muslim community. A motto that has been tested in recent days after a surge of hateful comments towards Muslims on social media following a fire at the Baitul Futuh mosque

The post After the fire, why the Ahmadiyya community will not give into hate , by Rima Amin appeared first on TELL MAMA.

The English Defence League: Challenging Our Country and Our Values of Social Inclusion, Fairness and Equality. A detailed report on key leaders within the English Defence League, their funders and those that formulate its strategy. This report is a damning insight into a group that promotes a non-racist image, yet those aligned and linked to it hold views that are openly discriminatory against all Muslims and some speak the same language of the British National Party – the language of exclusionism, of non-equal human rights and of the need to ‘send people back.’ These values go contrary to what our country stands for and what we as a nation are about. We are about Fairness, Freedom, Hard Work, Equality and Social Inclusion. We are a modern Britain and a modern nation born from hard work and fairness!

Please Note:
We would like to clarify that Mark Israel, described in paragraph 4.9. of our report on the English Defence League as “a former volunteer with the Board of Deputies’ Community Security Trust (CST)”, has not been a CST volunteer for many years; and that CST (a separate organisation from the Board of Deputies) has repeatedly condemned the EDL, for example in the following posts on the CST Blog:

• https://thecst.org.uk/blog/?p=555
• https://thecst.org.uk/blog/?p=686
• https://thecst.org.uk/blog/?p=963
• https://thecst.org.uk/blog/?p=1602
• https://thecst.org.uk/blog/?p=1956