A woman accused of expressing support for Hamas told a crowd the proscribed organisation is “fighting for freedom”, a court has heard.

On Monday, Bristol Crown Court heard Kwabena Devonish, 27, is alleged to have said she was “sick” of “being told to condemn Hamas”.

Devonish is accused of having expressed an opinion or belief in support of the proscribed organisation during a speech in November 2023.

The court heard Devonish had attended a march in Cardiff and addressed a crowd gathered at Ty William Morgan in Central Square.

Devonish was arrested in January 2024 after a video of the speech was posted on social media.

In a video played to the jury, Devonish said: “I would never condemn the resistance of Palestinians because their resistance is due to the occupation.

“So, if you want to talk about violence, if you want to talk about atrocities, then point the finger to the state of Israel.

“I am sick of being told to condemn Hamas, when Hamas are fighting for freedom, Hamas are fighting for the people.”

The court heard the march took place on November 11 2023 and was attended by about 500 people.

Diana Wilson, prosecuting, said: “There is no dispute this is Miss Devonish (in the video) and she is addressing a crowd, likely at the end of the march.”

Devonish, of Pentrebane, Cardiff, is charged with expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation, namely Hamas, contrary to the Terrorism Act 2000.

The trial continues.

Labour MP David Lammy has told Twitter it must get “much faster at removing hate” after a delay to deleting racist abuse targeted at him.

The shadow justice secretary said on Monday that it took more than 13 hours for the social media giant to act before it suspended the perpetrator’s account.

Home Secretary Priti Patel said Twitter “must take decisive action against this sort of vile content much faster” following the “awful racist abuse”.

The latest criticism of Twitter comes after social networks were condemned for failing to act quickly enough over a series of anti-Semitic messages sent by grime artist Wiley.

Mr Lammy tweeted: “13+ hours later, the police are investigating and Mikolaos Nichaloliakos’ tweet calling me a ‘monkey boy’ and making threats about ‘hanging’ are still live.

“You (Twitter) need to get so much faster at removing hate.”

Scotland Yard said the tweet’s “contents are being assessed” after an allegation of malicious communication towards the MP on Sunday.

Twitter said: “Racist behaviour has no place on our service. We have policies in place that address abuse and harassment, violent threats, and hateful conduct.

“If we identify accounts that violate any of these rules, we’ll take enforcement action. This account in question has been suspended for violating our hateful conduct policy.”

Downing Street was among those to criticise Twitter and Instagram for not acting sooner over Wiley’s message, saying last week their response had “not been good enough”.

On Monday, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said: “Social media platforms must be quicker at taking action against hate.”

The slide into a bizarre world of believing conspiracy theories and voicing openly toxic and bigoted views took place slowly over the last decade whilst many of us were not able to fathom how quickly and extensively social media had taken charge of our lives. As the Founder and previous Director of Tell MAMA, which supports victims of anti-Muslim hate, the world that I know of today, as someone reaching his fifties, is virtually unrecognisable to the one in which I worked just a decade ago and where there was real hope that levels of racism, prejudice and intolerance were finally on a downward slope.

Today’s world is also a far cry from that in which I grew up. As a refugee from Amin’s Uganda in 1972, and having fled a second time from Africa in 1983 because of military instability in Kenya, I suffered at first hand the openly racist abuse meted out to Asians and African-Caribbean communities in Kent where I was schooled. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, that open racism existed, flourished and led to the murder of young black men such as Stephen Lawrence. Such open hatred impacted on many young men and women from BME communities, though the economic boom of that period helped to also temper some of the racist anger and bigotry. Anti-racism work, equality marches and work-based equal opportunity schemes seem to have turned the tide against division that many of us assumed would mean a country more at ease with its diversity.

Whilst the UK is in a far better place than the ’80s, the reality is that, as a country, we have slid backwards towards openly aggressive far-right marches rallying thousands of people, national political instability and a rising sense of mistrust which is acutely felt between BME communities and the two main parties. This, mixed with a recent economic crisis, has created the perfect storm for social insecurity and it is this insecurity that some have played upon in fomenting divisive and openly hostile views toward groups of people in our society. It is also within this environment of insecurity that people have sought comfort within narratives of division that blame others and which provide a sense of meaning to them, however twisted that may be.

For such individuals, conspiracy theories become reality since the world around them is unstable and frightening. Grasping onto something almost tangible, that explains the complexity of life in a simplistic fashion, fills the void that many of us currently feel in an increasingly frightening world. This is why, for example, conspiracy merchants who peddle views of an ‘Islamic takeover’ or of hordes of Muslims outbreeding other communities, manage to find a receptive audience. With less money in people’s pockets, communities aggressively vying for resources in austerity, and a sense of confusion as to where we are heading as a nation, you can see how easy it is for people to believe that there are hidden factors at play. The culprits, in their opinion, are more than likely Muslims, Jews or migrants.

Both Muslims and Jews have felt a sharp rise in hostility towards them and hate crime figures show such a rise over the last five years. Much of this is due to hate online and, furthermore, since 2012, when I founded Tell MAMA, it was clear to me that social media companies would not remove hateful and criminal material, nor would they take down far-right, neo-Nazi or Islamist extremist accounts. Their business model was based on getting traction for their technological revolutions through more accounts opening up. In doing so, they helped create the fog and smoke of disinformation and gave an amplified voice to extremist groups masquerading as ‘free speech’ martyrs. These companies, whilst levelling the playing field for more voices to be heard, also exposed people to views and opinions that would have been marginalised for a reason. Yet their platforms also legitimised toxic views by placing those views into a worldwide market of ideas where extremist groups were better equipped to promote them.

Let me explain. Marginalised, divisive and racist groups by their very nature had to be far more energetic and driven to try to win supporters. Before the advent of social media these people had to host events, print leaflets and remain active at a street level. That all took time and money and, to make it worse, they also looked pretty scary. However, such groups were always driven; they had to be to survive.

Now post their divisive messages on social media with a ‘friendly face’, remove the racist insignia and blame migrants, Muslims and foreigners, and strangely there was a more receptive audience as people’s fears and insecurities rose over the last decade. Additionally, as many of us played catch-up to try to challenge extremist and divisive views, these individuals and groups already had a head start since they were naturally driven and could see the power of the new platforms. It was a toxic, heady mix that was to have a severe impact on our society, as we are now seeing today.

This is why we must mobilise and defend the social values we enjoy in our country, and which are under threat. It is not just those, as this paper has highlighted, who try and divide local communities, who we must challenge; it is also those beyond our shores, who support extremist groups and seek to destabilise our democracy by fomenting instability, whom we must remain vigilant against. If we take our eye off the ball in these crucial years, it is not only our values which may change – it could be our very understanding of reality. Now that truly is frightening.

British foreign minister Jeremy Hunt accused Google on Thursday of abandoning its moral values by failing to remove child abuse content while launching a version of its search engine in China that will block some websites.

The British government has repeatedly criticized online platforms such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook for failing to remove abusive material or sexual content posted online even after they were notified.

“Seems extraordinary that Google is considering censoring its content to get into China but won’t cooperate with UK, US … in removing child abuse content,” Hunt said on Twitter. “They used to be so proud of being values-driven.”

Alphabet’s Google plans a search engine in China that will block some search terms and websites, two sources told Reuters earlier this month, in a move that could mark its return to a market it abandoned eight years ago on censorship concerns.

Google said in a statement they agreed with Hunt that child sexual abuse was “abhorrent and must be removed, that’s why we co-operate with governments to fight child sexual abuse online”.

Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand invited major technology companies to attend a meeting on tackling child abuse and extremism on their websites, but the firms declined to attend, the Daily Mail reported on Thursday.

Google said they did offer to send an executive to the conference.

In January, Prime Minister Theresa May used an address at the World Economic Forum in Davos to say investors should use their financial power to force internet firms into taking more responsibility for stopping militants and paedophiles using their platforms.

Google, which quit China’s search engine market in 2010, has been actively seeking ways to re-enter China where many of its products are blocked by regulators.

Leading human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have urged Google not to bow to censorship demands in China because by doing so, they allege, the company would be complicit in the repression of freedom of speech.

Search terms about human rights, democracy, religion and peaceful protests will be among the words blacklisted in the search engine app, which The Intercept website said had already been demonstrated to the Chinese government.

The project, code-named “Dragonfly”, has been under way since the spring of 2017, the news website said.

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.

Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and Alphabet Inc. collectively removed hundreds of accounts tied to an alleged Iranian propaganda operation on Tuesday, while Facebook took down a second campaign it said was linked to Russia.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the accounts identified on his company’s platform were part of two separate campaigns, the first from Iran with some ties to state-owned media, the second linked to sources which Washington has previously named as Russian military intelligence services.

Officials in Iran, where it is a holiday to mark the Muslim Eid al-Adha festival, were not immediately available to comment. Moscow has repeatedly denied using hacking or fake social media accounts to influence foreign elections. The Russian embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move by Facebook and others is the latest attempt by global social media giants to guard against political interference on their platforms. It comes as concerns are rising about foreign attempts to disrupt the U.S. midterm elections in November.

The United States earlier this year indicted 13 Russians for alleged attempts to meddle in U.S. politics, but the latest alleged Iranian activity, exposed by cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc. suggests the problem may be more widespread.

“It really shows it’s not just Russia that engages in this type of activity,” Lee Foster, an information operations analyst with FireEye, told Reuters.

FireEye said the Iranian campaign used a network of fake news websites and fraudulent social media personas spread across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google Plus and YouTube, to push narratives in line with Tehran’s interests.

The Iranian mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment.

The activity was aimed at users in the United States, Britain, Latin America and Middle East up through this month, FireEye said, and included “anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes” as well as advocacy of policies favorable to Iran such as the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal.

FireEye said the Iranian activity did not appear “dedicated” to influencing the upcoming election, though some of the posts aimed at U.S. users did adopt “left-leaning identities” and took stances against President Donald Trump.

That activity “could suggest a more active attempt to influence domestic U.S. political discourse” is forthcoming, Foster said, but “we just haven’t seen that yet.”

‘DISTINCT CAMPAIGNS’

Facebook said the Russia-linked accounts it removed were engaged in “inauthentic behavior” related to politics in Syria and Ukraine. It said that activity did not appear to be linked to the Iranian campaign.

“These were distinct campaigns and we have not identified any link or coordination between them. However, they used similar tactics by creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing,” the company said in a statement.

Facebook last month removed 32 pages and accounts tied to another misinformation campaign without describing its origins, but which U.S. lawmakers said likely had Russian involvement.

Microsoft said this week that hackers linked to the Russian government sought to steal email login credentials from U.S. politicians and think tanks, allegations the Russian foreign ministry described as a “witch-hunt.”

FireEye said the U.S.-focused Iranian activity ramped up last year, just months after Trump took office, with websites and social media accounts posting memes and articles, some of which were apparently copied from legitimate U.S. and Iranian news outlets.

In some cases, the domains for the fake websites like “US Journal” and “Liberty Free Press” were originally registered years before the 2016 election, in 2014 and 2013, but most remained inactive until last year, FireEye said.

Arabic-language, Middle East-focused websites appear to be part of the same campaign, the company added.

The technology companies variously said they linked the accounts to Iran based on user phone numbers, email addresses, website registration records and the timing of account activity matching Iranian business hours.

FireEye expressed “moderate confidence” about the Iranian origins, but said it has not been able to tie the accounts back to a specific organization or individuals.

Hundreds of thousands of people followed one or more of the Facebook pages implicated in the campaign, Facebook said.

It shared examples of removed posts, including a cartoon depicting an Israeli soldier executing a Palestinian and a fake movie poster showing President Trump embracing North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Postings cited by FireEye expressed praise for U.S. politicians and other Twitter users who criticized the Trump administration’s decision in May to abandon the Iranian nuclear pact, under which Iran had agreed to curb its nuclear weapons program in exchange for loosening of sanctions.

Some Twitter and Facebook accounts were designed to appear as if they were real people in the U.S., Britain and Canada, according to FireEye. The accounts used a combination of different hashtags to engage in U.S. culture, including “#lockhimup,” “#impeachtrump” and “notmypresident.”

Twitter, which called the effort “coordinated manipulation,” said it removed 284 accounts.

Facebook said it removed 254 pages and 392 accounts across its flagship platform as well as its Instagram service. Some of the accounts had events and groups associated with them.

The accounts spent about $12,000 to advertise through Facebook and Instagram using a variety of currencies, Facebook said. The company said it had notified the U.S. Treasury and State departments of the purchases, which may potentially violate sanctions.

Alphabet, which includes Google and YouTube, did not respond to a request to comment.

Facebook Inc. said on Tuesday it had identified a new coordinated political influence campaign to mislead its users and sow dissension among voters ahead of November’s U.S. congressional elections.

It said it had removed 32 pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram, part of an effort to combat foreign meddling in U.S. elections.

The company stopped short of identifying the source of the misinformation. But members of Congress who had been briefed by Facebook on the matter said the methodology of the influence campaign suggested Russian involvement.

“I can say I think with pretty high confidence I think this is Russian-related,” Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters at the U.S. Capitol.

Two U.S. intelligence officials told Reuters there was not sufficient evidence to conclude that Russia was behind the Facebook campaign, but one noted that “the similarities, aims and methodology relative to the 2016 Russian campaign are quite striking.”

A Russian propaganda arm tried to tamper in the 2016 U.S. election by posting and buying ads on Facebook, according to the company and U.S. intelligence agencies. In February, the U.S. Justice Department indicted 13 Russian nationals, and the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, for interfering in the 2016 U.S. election.

Moscow has denied involvement.

Facebook has been on the defensive about influence activity on its site and concerns over user privacy tied to long-standing agreements with developers that allowed them access to private user data.

‘ARMS RACE’

The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, which was shown the suspended pages ahead of the takedown, said they showed similarities in language and approach to previously fake accounts from the Internet Research Agency, which is known as the “troll factory” because it stirs up public opinion on social media sites.

The lab cited “consistent mistranslation, as well as an overwhelming focus on polarizing issues at the top of any given news cycle.” It said, for example, the posts on the year-old, feminist Resisters page “took a liberal or left-wing stance on issues around gender, race, immigration, and human rights.” Other pages promoted racial pride among minority groups.

The group said the Resisters page was alarming because it was pushing for confrontation at multiple protests, including against “Unite the Right 2,” with a potential for violence.

A man who identified himself as an administrator of Resisters, Washington activist Brendan Orsinger, said on a video call with Reuters that he had been invited to help operate the page by someone he knew only through Facebook messages.

“I definitely had concerns, because people don’t usually invite me to accounts unless they know me,” Orsinger said. “But at the same time, this was an account we could use.”

He said that more than a dozen legitimate activist groups were still supporting the counter-rally and would now have to work harder to reconnect with people who had been following it through the Resisters page.

Orsinger said he was not yet sure that the account that had involved him was Russian, but that if it was, he was concerned about he and fellow activists being infiltrated and influenced.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said on a call with reporters that the attempts to manipulate public opinion would likely become more sophisticated to evade Facebook’s scrutiny, calling it an “arms race.”

The White House said the administration was supportive of Facebook’s actions.

“We applaud efforts by our private-sector partners to combat an array of threats that occur in cyberspace, including malign influence,” said Garrett Marquis, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

U.S. President Donald Trump has come under fire for discounting the threat of interference in the congressional elections.

During his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki earlier this month, Trump appeared to state that he believed Russia was no longer trying to influence the U.S. election process.

Trump later amended that, saying he was “very concerned” about Russian interference in the election. On Friday, Trump held a meeting with his national security advisers on election security.

DIVISIVE ISSUES

Facebook identified influence activity around at least two issues, including the counter-protest to the Unite the Right 2 rally set next week in Washington. The other was the #AbolishICE social media campaign aimed at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

In an online post, Facebook said it was disclosing the influence effort now in part because of the rally. A previous event last year in Charlottesville, Virginia, led to violence by white supremacists.

“This kind of behavior is not allowed on Facebook because we don’t want people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they’re doing,” the company said.

More than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the pages and about $11,000 had been spent on about 150 ads, Facebook said. The pages had created about 30 events since May 2017.

Facebook officials on a call with reporters said one known account from Russia’s Internet Research Agency was a co-administrator of one of the fake pages for seven minutes, but the company did not believe that was enough evidence to attribute the campaign to the Russian government.

The company previously said 126 million Americans may have seen Russian-backed political content on Facebook over a two-year period, and that 16 million may have been exposed to Russian information on the Instagram photo-sharing app.

Over the past several months, the company has taken steps meant to reassure U.S. and European lawmakers that further regulation is unnecessary. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg says the company has 20,000 people working to police and protect the site.

The Times has just completed a detailed investigation into the way that advertising and pay per view clicks fund extremist and other content on the Internet and in the last few days they have also highlighted how child pornography and other activity, including the promotion of extremist material, has taken place inadvertently through the algorithm systems set up by social media companies.

We complained to a social media company about 8 weeks ago about how their algorithms were promoting far right and Islamist material to members of Muslim communities in the United Kingdom. In particular, Islamist material was being promoted to individuals who had an interest in Islam, Muslims and facets related to both and the algorithms were inadvertently strengthening such groups who promote a world view of political Islam at the expense of the rights of others communities and with narratives that include a ‘war being waged on Islam’ and where Muslims are the ‘victims’ of the West. Some of these groups have also wavered on what is terrorism and when it takes place in our country.

We would urge social media companies to ensure that their algorithms do not support groups who are against universal values of human rights, pluralism, free speech, democratic values and the right to question and dissent in communities. These are fundamental values and the last thing we want is for society to be shaped by a set of algorithms who know nothing about the context and nature of groups.

We will continue to make the case on such issues and we will continue to move forward constructively on such matters with social media companies.

Facebook has assured Pakistan that concerns about blasphemous content on the social media site will be addressed and a company delegation will visit this week to discuss the issue with the government, the interior minister said on Tuesday.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif earlier this month ordered that blasphemous content on social media be removed or blocked and that anyone posting such material be punished, and the government requested a meeting with Facebook.

Blasphemy is a criminal offence in the strictly Islamic country and can carry the death penalty.

Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, quoting from what he said was a letter from Facebook’s vice president received a day earlier, told reporters: “I wanted to reiterate that Facebook takes the concerns raised by the Pakistani government very seriously. We have also committed our representative to meet with you and senior officials of your government.”

Khan described this message as a “very big improvement” from Facebook as, he said, the U.S. social media giant generally had not responded to such complaints in the past.

He said Facebook through Pakistan’s ambassador in the United States has told him that over the past few months it had blocked 62 blasphemous webpages, and 45 in the past several days alone.

“We see it very positively that at the highest level Facebook has responded and takes this issue seriously.”

He said Pakistan’s Washington ambassador had spoken to the FBI and Justice Department to underline Islambad’s concerns and both agencies had been receptive.

There was no immediate comment from Facebook.

Last week, Khan warned he would close social media sites that fail to prevent online blasphemy, but gave no details.

Facebook data indicate the social media app has about 25-30 million active users in Pakistan even though Internet penetration remains poor in the South Asian nation. Facebook’s Instagram unit and rival Twitter are also popular.

The ruling PML-N party’s tough talk against blasphemy will appeal to its conservative voter base ahead of elections likely to take place next year.

At least 65 people, including lawyers, defendants and judges, have been murdered by Islamist militants over blasphemy allegations in Pakistan since 1990, according to think-tank figures and local media.

Community Organisations Tackling Hate Incidents and Hate Crimes Come Together in France

Three French anti-racism associations said on Sunday they would file legal complaints against social networks Facebook, Twitter and Google’s Youtube for failing to remove “hateful” content posted on their platforms.

French law requires websites to take down racist, homophobic or anti-semitic material and tell authorities about it.

But French Jewish students union UEJF and anti-racism and anti-homophobia campaigners SOS Racisme and SOS Homophobie said the three firms had removed only a fraction of 586 examples of hateful content the anti-racism groups had counted on their platforms between the end of March and May 10.

Twitter removed only four percent, Youtube seven percent and Facebook 34 percent, according to the associations.

“In light of Youtube, Twitter and Facebook’s profits and how little taxes they pay, their refusal to invest in the fight against hate is unacceptable,” UEJF president Sacha Reingewirtz said in a statement.

Germany got Facebook, Google and Twitter to agree in December to delete hate speech from their websites within 24 hours.

The post Facebook, Twitter, Youtube face hate speech complaints in France appeared first on TELL MAMA.