ByOMRI NAHMIAS

WASHINGTON - The Senate Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing on Thursday to discuss domestic terrorism and violent extremism to “examine the threat of racially, ethnically, religiously and politically motivated attacks. It was the second hearing that the committee held on this topic this week.

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti Defamation League (ADL) called on Congress to act and  “to look very seriously at dramatic and deep reform” of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

“It literally exempts the social media companies from any responsibility, from any accountability, for the content that they publish,” he said. “There is literally no other sector of business, which benefits from this broad immunity for its very products and services.”

“We've been defending the first amendment for over a hundred years, we take freedom of speech very seriously, but the freedom of speech is not the freedom to slander,” Greenblatt continued. “Nor is the freedom of expression, the freedom to incite violence.”

He said that practices such as “the algorithmic amplification of hate because it drives clicks to monetizing that content because that drives revenue - none of that should be acceptable.”

According to Greenblatt, ADL researchers found that 2020 was the third highest year on record for antisemitic incidents since we began tracking this data in the 1970s. “Social media is a super spreader of hate,” he said. “You can find it with just a few clicks, right from your phone. Intolerance is increased and amplified by algorithms that invisibly induce users further down the rabbit hole of radicalism. It's all unacceptable.”

“We've been urging at ADL pushing the tech [industry] to take meaningful action for years - simply to enforce their own terms of service - but they've failed to do so,” he added. “That's why we've also called on policymakers like you to finally hold them accountable for their role in enabling the spread of extremism. The time for action against the extremist threat is now. We need an 'all hands on deck' approach in government, and really a whole of society strategy to combat domestic terrorism and violent extremism.”

“Facebook is literally a trillion dollar corporation that earned $80 billion in revenue last year, $24 billion in profit,” he continued. “They have more users than any country on the planet has citizens. This is one of the most innovative businesses in the history of capitalism. They, if they chose to, could apply their resources to solve this problem tomorrow. It simply requires them enforcing their own terms of service.”
On Tuesday, Eric Fingerhut, CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America testified before the Committee, to speak about securing Jewish communities. “"Regretfully, I think all faith-based institutions and nonprofit institutions in our country are becoming aware of the threats that they face,” said Fingerhut. “And particularly, regrettably, I must say, it's true of the Jewish community, which, for 23 straight years, has experienced the largest percentage of hate crimes according to FBI statistics of any religious-based group."
 
He went on to say that "It is unfortunately the case that we now have wide recognition of the need to have a layer of physical security in all of our faith-based institutions and our nonprofit institutions that we never thought we would have to have”
 
“As you travel the world, it is routine that there are security guards and physical security of all kinds besides faith-based institutions and regret -- we regret that now that reality has now come to our great country,” Fingerhut added.