Meta now has a "Jewish Diaspora" policy chief whose job it is to "demand censorship of Israel's critics" on Facebook and Instagram.
Jordana Cutler is a long-time senior government official in Israel who personally advised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party. Now, she trolls Facebook and Instagram in search of pro-Palestine posts that offend her and tags them for removal due to "hate speech."
The Intercept's Sam Biddle ran a piece about Cutler that explains how she repeatedly went after Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an on-campus group that was helping to organize anti-war protests after October 7.
Cutler is Meta's go-to liaison for censoring pro-Palestine content across Meta's array of digital products. She is using her position to aggressively target anyone whose commentary about what Israel is doing in Gaza and other Palestinian territories upsets her.
Watch below as Cutler explains how she uses her position to censor "hate speech" that "makes Jewish people feel unsafe." Watch as Cutler also takes credit for Meta's banning of "harmful stereotypes like 'Jews run the world'" as "hate speech" after consulting with the World Jewish Congress.
Facebook's "Jewish Diaspora" chief Jordana Cutler explains how she uses her position to censor "hate speech" that "makes Jewish people feel unsafe."
She says Meta banned "harmful stereotypes like 'Jews run the world'" as "hate speech" after consulting w/ World Jewish Congress. pic.twitter.com/d6bD8vMa3o
— Chris Menahan ?? (@infolibnews) October 22, 2024
(Related: Have you checked out the five most common genetic diseases among Ashkenazi Jews?)
Meta fumes over media's efforts to publish "dangerous and irresponsible" article about Cutler's censorship habits
Cutler's flagging tool of choice seems to be Meta's "Dangerous Organizations and Individuals" policy, which bars users of Meta products from discussing a secret list of thousands of blacklisted entities. Said policy restricts the "glorification" of everything on the blacklist while supposedly still allowing for "social and political discourse" and "commentary."
Note that Cutler is only in charge of flagging content, not removing. This means that not everything she flags automatically gets censored, though experts note that quite of bit of flagged content ends up getting removed.
When pressed with a detailed list of questions about Cutler's post-flagging philosophy, Meta responded to the media by chastising them for trying to write a "dangerous and irresponsible" article about her.
Meta spokesperson Dani Lever wrote that whoever "flags a particular piece of content for review is irrelevant because our policies govern what is and isn't allowed on platform."
"In fact, the expectation of many teams at Meta, including Public Policy, is to escalate content that might violate our policies when they become aware of it, and they do so across regions and issue areas," Lever continued.
"Whenever any piece of content is flagged, a separate team of experts then reviews whether it violates our policies."
According to Lever, The Intercept's coverage and questioning of Cutler "deliberately misrepresents how our processes work," though the company declined to specify precisely how.
Cutler first joined Meta in 2006 after working at a high level within the Israeli government. She worked several years at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., followed by a stint working for both Netanyahu and the Likud party.
When she was first hired in 2016, then-minister of public security, strategic affairs and information Gilad Erdan commented that her appointment as Facebook's Israel-Palestine censorship czar represents "an advance in dialogue between the State of Israel and Facebook."
Cutler says she is really "proud" of her employer's partnership with the World Jewish Council, which helped her put together a censorship mechanism for people who question the Holocaust.
The latest news about free speech being silenced on social media can be found at Censorship.news.
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