Hamas War

Sunday, April 5, 2009

AntiSemitism on Facebook!

Recently I received the following note from a friend:

My grandchild, -, took the quiz "What Religion are you?" on Facebook, and this is what it replied:
"Jew-
You are cheap, smart, rich and most people hate you. You are great at business and know how to make money. Everyone blames you for everything and you blame them. You are probably very Conservative."


Please help get this material off Facebook by taking the quiz and reporting it to the Abuse department. Please spread the word.


This is no "urban legend." I do know the people involved.

I inquired how a pre-teen could be on Facebook, and I was told that the family uses it to post pictures to each other. Personally, I don't like the popular use of Facebook for posting pictures for family and friends. There isn't enough control over it, and as in this case, it exposes young children to an adult-oriented site. There must be something safer.

Recently, I opened a WEJEW account, the same name, shilohmuse, as my youtube. It does have a picture upload option, besides the videos, and it's "clean." At least it's as clean as anything can be, since they check what you've uploaded before making it viewable.

Of course, even on WEJEW, one should be alert to people abusing it for the wrong reasons, but it has the potential to be a much safer alternative, at least for Jews, who use the internet for videos, movies and photos.

This is not a blame the victim post. Certainly spread the word about Facebook's definition of a Jew, and do investigate and patronize safer internet sites.

6 comments:

Mathias Hellsten said...

While I definately think it's commendable to try find anti-semitism and trying to combat it, I must say:

Facebook has an open API (application programming interface), called the Facebook Platform, which provides a framework for third party developers to create applications that interact with core Facebook features. The tests are such a third party application, probably created in turn by someone else.

Which means, it's not Facebook's views that is projected in that test, but the individual user's. Facebook is very concerned about their public image, which means that if you report this specific test, the company will probably do what they can to dicipline the user. In any case, the test will most certainly disappear once the Facebook abuse team learns of it.

Batya said...

Thanks
I believe that is the reason my friend requested reporting it to facebook.

Mathias Hellsten said...

Oh, sorry, I failed to understand that. My mistake. :)

Maya / מיה said...

wow, that's really shocking. How can the cycle of antisemitism repeat so many times without us identifying it as what it is?

Avi said...

Facebook is not as concerned about it's public policy when it comes to anti-semitism/anti-israel materials.

The JIDF - http://www.thejidf.org/ - is an organization that combats anti-semitism/anti-Israel materials on the net and a lot of its time and efforts are focused on Facebook, with virutally no assistance from Facebook itself. The JIDF should be commended and they could use your help, but do not rely on Facebook to take care of this issue.

As for the media sharing site wejew - http://www.wejew.com - I work with the website and, yes, we have 100% oversight over all files that are uploaded, and we only upload videos that are suitable; nothing anti-Israel, anti-semitic or not appropriate visually. Our goal is to be the Jewish youtube. Join the site today, search for all the Pesach videos and find them easily without filtering out all the un-appropriate stuff you would find on other video sharing sites.

Thanks for the mention in your blog post!

Pesach Sameach!

Batya said...

Maya, life's not simple as you know.

Avi, can the picture option on wejew expand,, so that people will use it, rather than the more dangerous facebook?