Deputy leader of Britain First tweets debunked anti-Muslim hoax leaflet

March 14, 2017 Article

The deputy leader of the far-right party Britain First shared a debunked anti-Muslim hoax leaflet on Twitter over the weekend.

Jadya Fransen, posting under the username @JadyaBF, tweeted: “When the Muslim community feel empowered enough to distribute these leaflets, you know your country’s Islamic appeasement has gone too far!” at 10:43 am on March 12, 2017.

The tweet promoted the For Public Purity campaign that Faith Matters exposed as a hoax. Clear indicators of a hoax included the registration of its domain to a server in the United States on March 29, 2016. On Facebook, the page shared an image that first appeared in a Methodist magazine published in 2012. Other concerns raised in the Faith Matters investigation included other examples of stolen images.

Yet, the most obvious example of the hoax concern the For Public Purity logo. The image below demonstrates how it spells the word ‘Lolz’.

Tell MAMA deconstructed the logo of the hoax.

Some 4Chan users did demonstrate a deeper knowledge of the campaign itself. It’s still unclear, however, who was behind the distribution of the leaflets in Manchester in July of last year.

This hoax did not stop the offending tweet gained hundreds of retweets. While some admirably did attempt to point out this obvious hoax, other comments, however, reflected a myriad of unrelated and deeper anxieties and prejudicial views towards Muslims more broadly. In one such example, the user @MissCJWright replied: “dogs impure but raping and beheading is fine??” This tweet also attracted non-violent extremist hate speech.

The 4publicpurity.org domain is no longer accessible, but the Facebook page remains inactive but accessible. This is a problem as it allows non-violent extremists to unabashedly propagate anti-Muslim hatred. In this example, the asynchronous nature of online discussions on Facebook may intensify the proliferation of more polarising and often hateful comments. Perhaps limiting the overall effectivness of counter speech.

The post Deputy leader of Britain First tweets debunked anti-Muslim hoax leaflet appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Categories: Britain First, For Public Purity, Hoax, Jayda Fransen, News

New Yorkers Scrub Off Neo-Nazi Hate Against Muslims and Jews

February 11, 2017 Article

The tale of the strangers aboard a New York subway car who teamed up this weekend to scrub away neo-Nazi graffiti went viral on Sunday, in an incident that highlighted a recent rise in hate and bias crimes reported around the country.

Passengers said on social media that when they boarded a subway car on Saturday night they found someone had drawn messages in black marker targeting Jews and Muslims and praising Adolf Hitler, the German leader responsible for the Holocaust.

“The train was silent as everyone stared at each other, uncomfortable and unsure what to do,” attorney Gregory Locke wrote later in a Facebook post.

Then, he added, “One guy got up and said, ‘Hand sanitizer gets rid of Sharpie. We need alcohol.’ He found some tissues and got to work.”

The Nazi symbolism was gone within two minutes, he added.

Locke’s Facebook post had been shared more than 342,000 times as of Sunday afternoon.

The clean-up was not a planned event but an example of spontaneous unity in a metropolis that prides itself on diversity, passengers said.

Those who joined the effort were “satisfied in just doing the right thing,” another of them, chef Jared Nied, told CNN.

The number of hate and bias incidents reported across the United States jumped in the days immediately after President Donald Trump’s election victory in November.

Last month, more than a dozen U.S. Jewish community centers were also targeted in three waves of telephone bomb threats, forcing evacuations though the threats were later determined to be hoaxes.

The subway incident was reported on Sunday to the New York Police Department, which is investigating it as a possible hate crime, Sgt. Jessica McRorie said.

The clean-up happened on a subway train near the Lincoln Center arts complex on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, McRorie said.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Sunday a similar incident happened in recent days, when a passenger on a different train spotted a swastika scrawled over an image of an American flag. The passenger, whom Cuomo did not name, used a marker to turn the symbol into a box with four quadrants and wrote in the letters L-O-V-E.

“This is what New Yorkers do – we turn hate into love,” Cuomo wrote on Twitter.

The post New Yorkers Scrub Off Neo-Nazi Hate Against Muslims and Jews appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Categories: Gregory Locke, Jews, Neo-Nazi graffiti, New York, New Yorkers, News, Subway

Home-grown streaming app helps Pakistan’s musicians find voice

February 10, 2017 Article

For years, violence kept most of Pakistan’s aspiring young musicians from following their dreams, whether the threat of Taliban militant attacks or gang wars in the crowded southern port city of Karachi.

Now, as law enforcement crackdowns slowly improve the security situation across the nation, some musicians are getting help from two-year old Pakistani start-up Patari, a music streaming and production company.

Both the startup and the musicians’ efforts are helping to carve out a new creative space for young people in Muslim-majority Pakistan, where those below 30 make up 60 percent of a population of almost 200 million.

Karachi rap ensemble Lyari Underground was once afraid of putting its music on Facebook, deterred by episodes of bloody gang war in the precinct of the same name that many Pakistanis consider the most dangerous in their largest city.

But the same violence has inspired many of the group’s songs, taking cues from the music of U.S. rapper Tupac Shakur, said its founder, who uses the name AnXiously.

“In a ghetto, rap exists naturally,” he added. “If there is no rap, then it is not a ghetto. Rap is a product of this reality and these surroundings.”

Band members said when they first heard the music of Tupac, although half a world away, it reminded them of their own experiences living with violence and poverty.

Lyari remains one of Karachi’s poorest areas and financial limitations often force its young people to forego creative pursuits.

FROM STREAMING TO PRODUCING

Launched in February 2015, Patari now boasts a library of 40,000 Pakistani songs and podcasts, and subscribers exceed half a million, said Chief Executive Khalid Bajwa.

Nearly 30 million of Pakistan’s people use the internet, mainly on mobile telephones, says digital rights organization Bytes for All.

Bajwa declined to discuss revenue, apart from saying the company was “self-sustaining”, mostly by producing events for established firms such as drinks company Pepsi, consumer goods giant Unilever and Pakistani clothing brand Khaadi.

The company’s latest initiative, Tabeer, or ‘Dream Come True’, pairs established artists with unknown musicians to produce six songs and music videos, completed on a budget of $15,000, and features on its app.

Patari exploited the fact that Pakistan’s tiny pop music scene comprised a couple of “corporate branded shows” featuring the same artists every year, but excluded amateur musicians.

“We saw an inefficiency in the market, where you have all this talent, all this interest, but there is nothing bridging the two,” said Chief Operating Officer Ahmer Naqvi.

The first two videos, featuring Abid Brohi, a rapper from remote Sibbi in southwestern Balochistan province, and 13-year-old tea vendor Jahangir Saleem, have drawn more than a million views, matching Coke Studio, Pakistan’s premier music programme.

Another video features Nazar Gill, from the capital, Islamabad, who was one of the cleaning staff at an apartment building where Naqvi once lived.

One day, Gill knocked on Naqvi’s door and asked to sing a song he had written.

“I sang my song for him and he liked it,” recalled Gill, a member of the country’s tiny Christian minority that prides itself on its musical tradition.

“He said, ‘Nazar, I will not let your voice go to waste.’”

OUT OF THE TALIBAN’S SHADOW

Tabeer’s sole female artist, Malala Gul, grew to love music as a child, by listening to an aunt who sang songs in the Pashto language spoken across Pakistan’s northwest.

Times were tough when she began singing five years ago, in a city roiled by Taliban-led violence.

“Conditions in Peshawar were very bad, but thank God the situation is much better now,” she said.

Gul stressed the importance of music, rebuffing those who call it unIslamic.

“This is a big world, and some people will say one thing, others will say another, but anyone who understands and values music will go very far.”

The post Home-grown streaming app helps Pakistan’s musicians find voice appeared first on Faith Matters.

Categories: Karachi, musicians, News, online, Pakistan, Pakistani songs

Facebook pledges fewer content removals, new criteria as yet unclear

October 31, 2016 Article

Facebook will allow more content on its platform that it would have earlier removed because it violated its standards, with new criteria being worked out, a senior executive said on Monday, following a row over the removal of an iconic Vietnam War photo.

His comments came on the same day that more than 70 rights groups asked Facebook to clarify its policies for removing content, especially at the behest of governments, alleging the firm had repeatedly censored postings that document human rights violations.

Only a month ago, the company and Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg came into conflict after Facebook deleted the photo of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack, called “The Terror of War”.

Solberg posted the photograph on her Facebook page after the company had deleted it from the sites of a Norwegian author and the newspaper Aftenposten, which mounted a front-page campaign urging Facebook to permit publication.

“We have made a number of policy changes after The Terror of War photo. We have improved our escalation process to ensure that controversial stories and images get surfaced more quickly,” said Patrick Walker, Facebook’s director of media partnership for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

“(And) in the weeks ahead, we are going to begin allowing more items that people find newsworthy, significant or important to the public interest, even if they might otherwise violate our standards,” Walker told a meeting of the Association of Norwegian Editors in Oslo, to which he was invited following the row.

DOMINANT ROLE

Walker’s comments echoed an Oct. 21 blog post by Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s head of global public policy, and Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s head of global operations and media partnerships, in which the executives said the firm would change its guidelines on removing content.

“Our intent is to allow more images and stories without posing safety risks or showing graphic images to minors and others who do not want to see them,” they wrote.

On Monday, Walker told Reuters Facebook was at the beginning of the process of changing its guidelines and could not give further details.

Reuters reported on Friday that an elite group of at least five senior executives, including chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, regularly directs content policy and makes editorial judgment calls, particularly in high-profile controversies.

To the audience of journalists, the Facebook executive said the company had to have global standards of content as it was mindful that content, such as nudity, that was acceptable in one country may not be acceptable in another.

Many were left unconvinced after the debate.

“Facebook is trying to isolate this as a question of rules about nudity, about being careful. But this is not the question I am raising,” Espen Egil Hansen, the editor-in-chief of Aftenposten, told Reuters.

“The question is whether they now have such a dominant role in distributing information and news that they are becoming a threat against important democratic processes.”

The post Facebook pledges fewer content removals, new criteria as yet unclear appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Categories: Content, graphic images, Hate Crimes, News, nudity, Viet Nam photo

Twitter cuts jobs with eye on 2017 profit; Vine discontinued

October 28, 2016 Article

Twitter Inc said Thursday it would cut 9 percent of its global workforce to keep costs down even as quarterly results eclipsed Wall Street’s beaten-down expectations, lifting shares that had fallen after a failed effort to sell the company.

More than 300 Twitter employees will be affected by the layoffs as part of a broader restructuring, a figure similar to an earlier round of reductions announced a year ago. Separately, the company announced it would discontinue Vine, a video app launched in 2013 that played brief clips on a repeat loop that struggled to compete with Facebook’s Instagram.

The reductions of staff and services were blunted somewhat by the backdrop of third-quarter revenue growth that slowed sharply but topped analysts’ expectations. Its stock was up 1.6 percent to $17.56, after rallying 5 percent in premarket trading.

Revenue rose about 8 percent to $616 million, above the average analyst estimate of $605.8 million. The company had reported a 20-percent rise in revenue in the previous quarter and 58 percent in the year-ago quarter.

Twitter, which has seen user growth stall amid competition from nimbler rivals such as Instagram and Snapchat, said its user base ticked up 3 percent to 317 million average monthly active users in the quarter.

Analysts, on average, had expected 316.3 million monthly active users, according to market research firm FactSet StreetAccount.

“The building blocks for revenue are increasing the number of users, and Twitter is not doing a particularly good job of that,” Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said. He added that Twitter needed to grow revenue by $200 million to $300 million a quarter to achieve 2017 profitability.

“The run-rate for the year is under $100 million in profit, so it is really hard to justify spending $15 or $18 billion to buy a $100-million profit (company),” Pachter said.

Total advertising revenue of $545 million grew 6 percent year-over-year, and 90 percent of it came from mobile.

Excluding items, the company earned 13 cents per share, beating the average estimate of 9 cents, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

The company is “more disciplined about how we invest in the business” and intends to be profitable in 2017, said Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto.

Among its priorities, Twitter is dedicated to growing its burgeoning live video offerings through partnerships with organizations such as the National Football League, Noto said. Advertisers are increasingly interested in live video because of its potential to reach new and younger audiences, he added.

Twitter hired bankers last month to field acquisition offers, but it has seen a dearth of potential bidders. Salesforce.com Inc, the last of a small cohort of companies including Walt Disney Co and Alphabet Inc believed to have been interested, said recently it would not pursue a deal.

The apparent lack of interest forced the social media company to consider a route anathema to aspiring tech startups: a major restructuring.

MORE LAYOFFS

Twitter had 3,860 employees globally as of June. The reduction of more than 300, chiefly in its sales, partnerships, and marketing efforts.

The cuts come about a year after a similar wave of layoffs of up to 336 employees were announced when Jack Dorsey, its co-founder who had been serving as interim chief executive, took over as permanent CEO. Since then, Dorsey has drawn criticism from some analysts for splitting his time between Twitter and Square.

The company said it expected cash expenditures of about $10 million to $20 million in the fourth quarter, mostly for severance costs.

On an investor call Thursday, Dorsey said he would not comment on speculation about a potential sale. He said in a statement that the company has “a clear plan, and we’re making the necessary changes to ensure Twitter is positioned for long-term growth.”

Asked by investors whether major events such as presidential debates or the Olympics affected Twitter’s quarterly growth in metrics, Noto said there needed to be such an event “every day” on the platform to meaningfully improve numbers, and “that’s where we’re headed.”

The popular but money-losing microblogging service spent aggressively on product development and marketing in recent years, betting it could afford losses as long as it attracted new users. But that growth stalled this year after it exceeded 300 million active monthly users, less than a fifth of Facebook Inc’s users and below Facebook’s Instagram.

The company’s net loss narrowed to $102.9 million, or 15 cents per share, in the third quarter, from $131.7 million, or 20 cents per share, a year earlier.

Twitter also said it would roll out “meaningful updates” next month affecting how it protects users from abusive content, an issue for which the company has endured growing criticism.

The post Twitter cuts jobs with eye on 2017 profit; Vine discontinued appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Categories: Job Cuts, Layoffs, News, Profits, staff

How the new CPS guidance on social media will target anti-Muslim trolls

October 10, 2016 Article

New guidelines from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) on social media may have wide ranging consequences for offenders.

Retweets do equal endorsements if it encourages the sharing of ‘grossly offensive’ materials. Other acts of “virtual mobbing” which incite hatred, can occur criminal charges. Participating in this form of online behaviour may incur charges under the Serious Crime Act 2007.

Prosecutors are reminded that Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 concern online materials deemed ‘grossly offensive’. Yet, “a communication sent has to be more than simply offensive to be contrary to the criminal law”. So in practise, context matters. A high criminal threshold also concerns ‘public interest’ and the right of free speech.

The CPS does not want to curtail free speech but it calls on prosecutors to consider how online statements impact and harm victims. For example, if there is a hate crime element to the communication, or the offence is repeated, this will factor into the seriousness of any potential offence.

Age, however, does matter. The guidance calls on prosecutors to show due lenience for individuals under the age of 18 – as children and young people may lack the maturity to understand the seriousness of such communications. Pursuing minors in this category is ‘rarely’ in the public interest.

Curtailing freedom of speech is not taken lightly – and is restricted to the measures of necessity and proportionality. So, for example, a case may fail this test if a perpetrator demonstrated remorse for their actions, or the communication was not intended for a large audience, where the intended audience did not include the victim or ‘target’ of the communication.

If, however, the motivation for online abuse were motivated by prejudice towards the victim’s ethnic origin, religion or other protected characteristics, this could put comments into the threshold of ‘grossly offensive’. This is also true for communications made during tragic events, where certain communities are impacted.

If prosecutors are unsure about the varieties of the language around anti-Muslim hate, they are encouraged to contact support groups like Tell MAMA or the victim for further clarification. In a welcome move, the CPS also recognises the intersectionality of hate speech. A victim may, for example, be targeted online because of their perceived religious identity and sexual orientation.

As Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders made clear: “The internet’s not an anonymous place where people can post without any consequences. People should think about their own conduct.

“If you are grossly abusive to people, if you are bullying or harassing people online, then we will prosecute in the same way as if you did it offline.”

A CPS consultation on these guidelines will run for the next 13 weeks. Tell MAMA will continue to support the CPS in its understanding of the complexities of anti-Muslim hate.

The post How the new CPS guidance on social media will target anti-Muslim trolls appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Categories: CPS, hate crime, Hate Speech, News

Jordanian Writer and Cartoonist Murdered in Broad Daylight by Religious Extremist

September 25, 2016 Article

Jordanian police stand guard in front of a hospital where the body of Jordanian writer Nahed Hattar, who was shot dead, was held in Amman, Jordan, September 25, 2016. REUTERS/Muhammad Hamed

Few would have known Nahed Hatter who had written on Islamist violence and narratives for decades. A writer who had left Jordan for the Lebanon for his views, he had returned to his country only to be murdered this morning for a cartoon that he had posted on his Facebook page.

The post initially was made around early August leading to charges being laid against Nahed Hattar based on insulting religious identity. Hattar subsequently deleted the post and was summoned to attend court to explain his actions. The initial post is listed below and mocked the world of IS or Daesh and implies that they make up what suits their worldly needs and that they have made themselves judges over God, who is drawn as the bearded man in the background. The cartoon and the work of Hattar was focussed on challenging Islamist narratives and the writer, who lived in a Muslim majority country, distinguished this line from the vast and overwhelming majority of Muslims who seek to worship and lead their lives in peace.

Nahed Hattar was murdered on the steps of a Jordanian court today. The perpetrator shot Hattar on multiple occassions and graphics highlighted the senseless murder through postings on Facebook.

The killing has shocked Jordan and highlights how sensitive issues are regarding faith and how delineating between Islamist narratives and Muslims has become deadly work.

Charges

The State prosecutor has charged the perpetrator with 3 charges. These include, wilfull premeditated murder, a terrorist act leading to the death of a person and carrying and possessing a firearm without a license. The case has also been referred to the State Security Court.

According to a source close to the investigation, the killer, who worked as an engineer at the Ministry of Education, said during the interrogation ‘he had planned to commit the crime for some time. He did not know or hear of the writer, Hatter, till he re- published his cartoons on his Facebook page.’ The perpetrator then searched through websites and he became aware of the court date where Hatter had been summoned to attend.

The source said the offender confessed to the crime, adding that the killer had bought a gun a week beforehand. This morning he walked on foot to his office towards the Palace of Justice in Abdali – Amman. According to a confession, the killer remained in wait for the writer for almost an hour, and after seeing Hatter with his friends he followed him onto the back stairs where he fired several times hitting Hatter in the neck and arm.

The source also noted that the killer stated that he was,

“convinced that Hatter offended God and should be killed and that anyone who offends God should be killed.”

The post Jordanian Writer and Cartoonist Murdered in Broad Daylight by Religious Extremist appeared first on Faith Matters.

Categories: Daesh, Jordan, Nahed Hattar, News, terrorism

Germany wants Facebook to take initiative in fight against online hate

August 29, 2016 Article

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere (C), Eva- Maria Kirschsieper, Facebook head of public policy D-A-CH (R) and Martin Ott, Facebook managing director central Europe, pose during a vistit at the Facebook office in Berlin, Germany August 29, 2016. REUTERS/Stefanie Loos

Germany’s interior minister visited Facebook’s offices in Berlin on Monday and said it should be more proactive in removing forbidden content from its social network platform.

“Facebook should take down racist content or calls for violence from its pages on its own initiative even if it hasn’t yet received a complaint,” Thomas de Maiziere said.

“Facebook has an immensely important economic position and just like every other large enterprise it has a immensely important social responsibility.”

The German government has been critical of Facebook in the past. Political leaders and regulators have complained the world’s largest social network, with 1.6 billion monthly users, had been slow to respond to hate speech and anti-immigrant messages.

Last year Justice Minister Heiko Maas told Reuters that Facebook must abide by stricter German laws banning racist sentiment even if it might be allowed in the United States under freedom of speech.

De Maiziere said he recognized Facebook’s efforts to develop software that can better identify outlawed content and praised its efforts to fight child pornography. He said it was right to warn users in its terms against the dissemination of illegal content.

“But it’s up to the company to ensure those terms are upheld,” he said. “A company with a good reputation for innovation will have to earn a good reputation in this area.”

Eva-Maria Kirschsieper, Facebook’s head of Public Policy in Germany, told reporters during de Maiziere’s visit that the discussions between political leaders and companies in social media would continue.

“We see ourselves as part of German society and part of the German economy,” she said. “And we know that we have a major responsibility and we want to live up to this responsibility. We take this issue very seriously indeed.”

Mark Wallace, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who now heads the Counter Extremist Project (CEP) in New York, a non-profit group that maintains a database of information about extremist groups, said Facebook was a leader in the social media sector in combating extremism, but more work was needed.

“Of all the companies, Facebook has done the most, but they’re all just starting to recognize that the weaponization of social media platforms is not good business and not good for society,” Wallace told Reuters.

CEP is completing testing of a new software tool that will identify new images and videos published on social media sites by Islamic State and other extremist groups, and remove them instantly wherever they occur, much as already done with child pornography images.

Earlier this year, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg came to Berlin to respond to the criticism. He said he had learned from Facebook’s experience in Germany that migrants were a group of people who also needed to be protected from hate speech online.

The post Germany wants Facebook to take initiative in fight against online hate appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Categories: Content, Germany's Interior Minister, hate content, News, online hate, Social Media platforms, Thomas de Maiziere

Facebook, Twitter, Youtube face hate speech complaints in France

May 15, 2016 Article

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.

Categories: France, Hate Crimes, hatred, legal complaint, News, online abuse, SOS Homophobie, SOS Racisme, UEJF, Youtube

Facebook, Twitter, Youtube face hate speech complaints in France

May 15, 2016 Article

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

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

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

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.

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

Categories: France, French, Google, Hate Crimes, hatred, legal complaint, News, online abuse, SOS Homophobie, SOS Racism, SOS Racisme, UEJF, Youtube

Deputy leader of Britain First tweets debunked anti-Muslim hoax leaflet

New Yorkers Scrub Off Neo-Nazi Hate Against Muslims and Jews

Home-grown streaming app helps Pakistan’s musicians find voice

Facebook pledges fewer content removals, new criteria as yet unclear

How the new CPS guidance on social media will target anti-Muslim trolls

Jordanian Writer and Cartoonist Murdered in Broad Daylight by Religious Extremist

Facebook, Twitter, Youtube face hate speech complaints in France

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

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