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Report: Israelis incite against Palestinians every 66 seconds

March 12, 2019 at 9:44 am

Social Media apps [Jason Howie/Flickr]

Israeli incitement against Palestinians on social media is on the increase, a report by Campaign – The Arab Centre for Developing Social Media issued yesterday has found.

According to Quds Press, Campaign said Israelis publish one inciting post against Palestinians every 66 seconds in 2018, compared to one post every 71 seconds in 2017.

The number of posts increased when the Knesset was discussing and voting on the new Nation-State Law which saw Israel become a nation-state for Jews only and demoted Arabic from a state language to a “language of merit”.

In 2018, the report said, Israelis published 474,250 posts which incited against Palestinians on social media; an increase from the 445,000 posts in 2017.

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The report found that half of the inciting posts were related directly to politics and most of them targeted Arab parliamentarians.

In May 2018, the Israelis posted more than 115,000 posts on social media that included insults, racism and called for practicing violence against the Palestinians.

Facebook, the report said, was the main platform used for such attacks, with 66 per cent of posts on the social media platform, while 16 per cent were on Twitter.

Campaign’s Director Nadim Nashef said: “The Israeli government is to blame for the continuous and increasing incitement against the Arabs and Palestinians.”

He added: “There are no monitors to oversee the Israeli incitement. This is very dangerous.”

Israel pass Facebook Bill which will authorise deleting content considered incitement - Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

Israel pass Facebook Bill which will authorise deleting content considered incitement – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]