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Jewish, Anti-Hate Groups Express Concern Over Meta’s New Fact-Checking Policy: ‘All of Society Will Suffer’

Meta logo is seen in this illustration taken August 22, 2022. Photo: Reuters

Jewish groups and a slew of other organizations said this week they are extremely worried about how Meta’s new community-driven, fact-checking system will worsen online antisemitism, hate speech, and disinformation, and increase the targeting of Jewish communities and individuals.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that starting in the United States, the social media giant is ending its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with a Community Notes model, like the one on Wikipedia and Elon Musk’s X. Zuckerberg said Meta —which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads — made the move in an effort to enhance free expression on its platforms.

“We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations” Meta announced. “We’ve seen this approach work on X — where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see. We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing — and one that’s less prone to bias.”

Meta added that besides “high-severity violations” — such as  terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud, and scams — it will not take action to enforce its policies unless someone reports an issue, to avoid “too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been.” Meta will also be “getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity, and gender.”

Hate speech and antisemitism will no longer be automatically flagged by Meta, and the company will not proactively remove such content unless a user reports the issue. However, even after receiving a report, there is no guarantee that Meta will delete the harmful content or that the report will be reviewed.

Yfat Barak-Cheney, executive director of the World Jewish Congress Technology and Human Rights Institute (TecHRI), said Meta’s new community notes system for fact-checking “must be approached with great caution.”

“Platforms like X and Wikipedia, which employ similar user-driven concepts, have demonstrated how easily misinformation and disinformation can be manipulated, and putting the onus on the vulnerable communities to report and correct information online,” she noted in a statement. “In an online environment already marked by hostility, we are deeply concerned that the reduction of protections and clear guidelines will open the floodgates to content that fuels real-world threats, including violent acts targeting Jewish communities and individuals.”

“Meta has made important strides in recent years to make its platforms safer, and it is critical that this work continues,” she added. “Rolling back these efforts risks undoing hard-won progress at a time when vigilance against online hate and antisemitism is needed more than ever.”

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) also criticized Zuckerberg’s announcement.

“It is mind blowing how one of the most profitable companies in the world, operating with such sophisticated technology, is taking significant steps back in terms of addressing antisemitism, hate, misinformation, and protecting vulnerable & marginalized groups online,” said ADL CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt. “The only winner here is Meta’s bottom line and as a result, all of society will suffer.”

“Meta must significantly reform their average user reporting process unless they intend to completely abdicate their responsibility to address antisemitism and hate at a time when it is surging online and offline,” the ADL Center for Technology and Society added. “If all of this is the direction Meta is heading in 2025, it is a bad sign of what is to come for Jews and all marginalized people on their platforms.”

Others outside of the Jewish community also expressed concern about the changes that Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday.

Cyberwell, a nonprofit organization that tackles online antisemitism, said in a released statement on X that the new Meta Community Notes system is “a systematic lowering of the bar on how Meta intends to enforce their Community Standards against hate speech and harassment online.” It also criticized Meta for now giving itself “less accountability” for hate speech that can now spread easier on its platforms. It said the move will result in “more hate speech, more politicized content, more silos, and less effective responses from the platforms.”

“Given the mounting evidence of how hate speech, incendiary content, and harassment lead to real-world harm including hate crimes, terror attacks, and child suicide, CyberWell is deeply concerned at the purposeful deterioration of Trust & Safety best practices at Meta,” the organization said. “For the Jewish community this announcement means that Meta is making it easier for antisemitism to flourish online. It will likely lead to an uptick in hate-posting, harassment, and even a migration of white supremacists and extreme racists onto Meta’s platforms, much like the period immediately following the Twitter acquisition.”

“This is not a victory for free speech — it’s an exchange of human bias in a small, contained group of fact-checkers for human bias at scale through Community Notes,” CyberWell added. “The only way to prevent censorship and data manipulation by any government or corporation would be to institute legal requirements and reforms on Big Tech that enforce social media reform and transparency requirements.”

“It’s incredibly dispiriting,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, during an appearance on ABC News.

“The new era for Meta is one in which it has decided to let liars, snake oil salesman, fraudsters, hate actors, propagandists for autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei unleash a tidal wide of disinformation many times the size of anything we’ve seen to date,” he added. “This is going to increase the spread and visibility of unchallenged lies, it’s going to worsen the spread of hate. It’s going to create more risk to our communities, our democracy, public health, and to our kids.”

Rose Burley, co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit organization the Center for Information Resilience, said the change will “undoubtedly” result in much more disinformation spreading on Meta’s platforms. “Meta, by doing this, are retreating from fact, they are retreating from truth,” he argued. “And by switching to a Community Notes model, they are effectively trying to capture a tidal wave in a bucket, and it’s not going to work … By getting rid of the fact-checkers, what you’re doing is taking away a safeguarding and you’re sending a message to users and to the wider community that truth and facts just don’t really matter anymore.”

The post Jewish, Anti-Hate Groups Express Concern Over Meta’s New Fact-Checking Policy: ‘All of Society Will Suffer’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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The Ballot Box Is the Key to Preserving — or Losing — Our Current System

The Reichstag in Berlin, Germany, c. 1941. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

In 1856, Abraham Lincoln, that master of the pithy aphorism, noted that “the ballot is stronger than the bullet.” So sharply observed, and it is one of those deceptively simple truths that history has confirmed time and again.

When Adolf Hitler burst into a Munich beer hall in 1923 with his ragtag band of brownshirts, he believed power in Germany could be seized at gunpoint. It was an utter fiasco. The so-called Beer Hall Putsch collapsed within hours, and Hitler found himself humiliated, imprisoned, and widely dismissed as a political clown. 

But prison became Hitler’s classroom. He studied, he reflected, and he came to the same conclusion as Lincoln — though with infinitely darker intent. The lesson was clear: brute force might win a battle, but ballots could win a nation. The real prize, Hitler realized, lay in working the system.

So Hitler traded the stormtrooper’s fist for the politician’s handshake. Over the next few years, he rebranded himself as a man of law and order, and the Nazis as a party of national revival and unbridled German pride. Critically, he played the parliamentary game with unnerving patience, slowly but surely building up popular support and parliamentary representation. 

By January 1933, the Nazi Party held only about a third of the seats in the Reichstag. But in a fractured political system, having the largest party in parliament was enough to be taken seriously. And once Hitler had that foothold, the unraveling was swift: the Reichstag Fire, the Enabling Act, the Night of the Long Knives, and finally, the death of President Hindenburg.

Within 18 months, Germany slid from democracy into dictatorship — and German democracy was no more. Lincoln was right. The ballot is stronger than the bullet. And Hitler proved it.

For centuries, the advance of Islamic power into Europe was checked on the battlefield. Charles Martel stopped the Muslim armies at Tours, France, in 732. Centuries later, Ferdinand and Isabella completed the Reconquista, driving the Moors out of Spain.

In 1683, the Ottomans were pushed back at the gates of Vienna, their imperial ambitions halted by a coalition of Christian armies. Each time, the clash was settled by soldiers, swords, and strategy. Whoever had the bigger, better army prevailed.

But today, the battlefield looks entirely different. In the twenty-first century, there are no cavalry charges across the plains of France or desperate last stands outside Vienna. The weapons have changed. The new battlefield is the ballot box, and the weapon of choice is demographics. 

Open immigration policies and an eagerness to celebrate multiculturalism in post-modern Europe and across the Western world have unwittingly created the conditions for a different kind of conquest. This is not a battle fought with sabers and cannons; instead, it is fought with voter registration and parliamentary seats. No longer is it the army with the most soldiers that wins — it is the community with the most ballots to cast.

And, as Hitler discovered, you don’t need an outright majority to shift the balance – you just need enough votes to be taken seriously. As long as there are enough voters to force the system to adapt around you, your agenda can no longer be ignored. 

The evidence is everywhere. In Britain’s recent election, a record-breaking 25 Muslim MPs were voted into the House of Commons — up from 19 in 2019. It may be a tiny fraction of seats overall, but it’s enough to mark a turning point. Most were Labour, although a handful came from across the political spectrum, including independents who campaigned almost exclusively on the issue of Gaza. 

The key thing is this — many don’t campaign as British patriots who happen to be Muslims, they campaign openly as Muslims first and everything else second. And with just 3.4 million Muslims in the UK — roughly six percent of the population — their representation in parliament is already beginning to punch above its weight.

In Canada, the 2025 federal election brought another milestone. Thirteen Muslim MPs entered parliament, up from eleven. The electoral success wasn’t accidental. Muslim advocacy groups coordinated nationally, launching websites and endorsements, rallying communities around a shared platform: “Free Palestine.”

In a Parliament of 343 seats, 13 members may sound like a rounding error. But in the Greater Toronto Area, where Muslims now comprise up to 14 percent of the population, the trend line is obvious. Bloc voting works, and the future is ominous.

In France, it’s the same story. Nineteen Muslim MPs were elected in 2024, mainly through alliances with left-wing parties determined to block Marine Le Pen’s far-right surge. France prides itself on strict secularism, but demography speaks louder than ideology — and particularly when Muslim candidates use their Islamic faith as their number one selling point. 

With Muslim voters already 10 percent of the French population, their influence is set to grow — and politics is re-calibrating to reflect that reality. It’s not for nothing that France, along with Canada and the UK, is set to recognize “Palestine” — the tail is wagging the national political dog.

The pattern is unmistakable. What once failed on the battlefield is now succeeding at the ballot box. A minority population, strategically mobilized, has become the kingmaker. You don’t need to conquer the palace gates with military might when you can simply walk through the front door with votes.

At the dawn of Jewish history, Moses warned the Jewish people to protect themselves from those who might use the system to undermine the moral conscience of national destiny. In Parshat Shoftim, he instructs them (Deut. 16:18): “Appoint for yourself judges and officers in all your gates…” 

The Torah’s vision of governance was never naïve. It is understood that no matter how inspired a nation may be, its ideals are only as strong as the safeguards that protect its core citizens. Every city gate needed gatekeepers. 

The medieval commentator Ramban notes that the verse places responsibility not just on leaders, but on the people themselves: it is “for yourself” — in the singular – meaning that every member of society has to be vigilant in ensuring that the values that matter are protected. 

Rav Hirsch goes even further, explaining that judges and officers are never meant to be mere bureaucrats. They must be guardians of the community’s moral center, ensuring that the law is not hijacked or twisted to serve destructive ends.

Moses knew what we so easily forget: freedom is fragile, and stability is a mirage. A nation can lose its way not only when enemies attack from outside, but when insiders exploit the system from within. That is why he delivered the crucial message that the system must be protected from enemies who might undermine it. Leave the city unguarded from these snakes in the grass, and sooner or later, everything you value will be gone — dismantled piece by piece.

Abraham Lincoln warned that the ballot is stronger than the bullet. He was right; Hitler proved it, and today’s Islamist movements are exploiting the same lesson. They no longer need to storm the gates with armies — they can stroll through them with votes. And once inside, all they need is enough useful idiots willing to go along with their twisted ideas.

Moses warned us long ago. He understood that the greatest danger to a nation is not necessarily foreign invasion, but the slow corrosion of values from within. That is why he insisted on vigilance. Judges and officers at every gate are not symbolic placeholders, but guardians against those who would manipulate the system to destructive ends. 

History’s harshest lesson is that freedom without awareness, and without the will to act, is always an invitation to tyranny. Hitler taught it in blood. The West seems to be in the midst of learning it again, the hard way. 

Which is why the Torah’s reminder — that unless we guard our gates, freedom itself can be dismantled — has never been more urgent.

The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California. 

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Palestinian Authority: Pay Terrorists First! Then Teachers (If Anything Is Left)

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas holds a leadership meeting in Ramallah, in the West Bank, April 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Torokman

As the school year is about to start, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is again showing its priorities. While it continues paying monthly salaries to imprisoned terrorists and “Martyrs”‘ families, costing $30 million/month (the “Pay-for-Slay” program) — teachers are forced to manage on a fraction of their salaries.

Because of international cuts in funding and cuts in Israeli tax transfers — due to the PA’s paying terror rewards — the PA has not paid full salaries to its civil servants since March 2019. At times, salaries were not paid at all, and now the PA is almost two months late in paying salaries.

Now, Palestinian teachers have had enough and are threatening a full strike if the PA does not pay them.

The General Union of Palestinian Teachers warned the PA:

Posted text: “The Union of [Palestinian] Teachers:

If the teachers’ salaries are paid before the start of the school year, the schools will operate as usual.
If the salaries are not paid before the start of the school year, the opening of the [school] year will be postponed until further notice.
If 70% of the salary is paid, the school week will be from Sunday to Wednesday.
In the case of less than 70% [salary], the school week will be from Sunday to Tuesday.”

[“Salaries of the State of Palestine – Private,” Telegram channel, Aug. 18, 2025]

This is not the first time that the PA teachers are striking.

On Feb 5, 2023, the PA teachers started a long strike until the PA returned satisfactory pay.

The PA is still in a grave financial crisis, due to its “terrorists first” ideology.

PA leader Mahmoud and PA officials have stressed numerous times that the PA’s top priority is rewarding the imprisoned terrorists and the dead terrorist “Martyrs’” families.

In January of this year, desperate for international acceptance, the PA announced for the world to hear that terror rewards would cease, and prisoners would be paid like all social welfare cases.

But a month later, Abbas retracted that in a speech to Palestinian leaders:

Click to play

Abbas at a meeting of the Fatah Revolutionary Council: I stand by my word: Even if we have [only] one penny left, it is for the prisoners and Martyrs.

I will not agree, and you will not agree, to reduce any obligation, any interest, or any penny given to them. They must receive everything, as it was in the past, and they are more precious than all of us!” [emphasis added]

[PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, YouTube channel, Feb. 21, 2025]

Terrorist mass murderers are the PA’s most precious people. And this is the government some Western countries want to recognize as a state!

The author is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared. 

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Proof That Hamas and Other Terrorists Were Operating from Nasser Hospital

Hamas terrorists carry grenade launchers at the funeral of Marwan Issa, a senior Hamas deputy military commander who was killed in an Israeli airstrike during the conflict between Israel and Hamas, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in the central Gaza Strip, Feb. 7, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed

The condemnations pouring in over Israel’s strike on Nasser Hospital this week are built on a false premise. The hospital is not a neutral medical facility. It has long since been hijacked by terrorists.

As previously reported by Palestinian Media Watch, Hamas turned Nasser Hospital into a center for interrogations and coercion.

In October 2024, as admitted by the Palestinian Authority itself on Facebook, Hamas was summoning Gazans to Nasser Hospital for interrogations by its military intelligence.

Shadi Subhi Al-Suweiti was ordered in the summons shown below “under the law of the State of Palestine and in accordance with our vested authority” to “report to Premises: Nasser Medical Center.”

In a Telegram post in April 2025 shown below, the hospital’s director of Nursing Services showed a note in which he was “threatened blatantly” by Palestinian Islamic Jihad for trying to prevent the organization from entrenching itself there: “Sweetie: You crossed the line – just wait! This is the first message. Al-Quds Brigades.”

While Israel’s Prime Minister’s Bureau issued a statement of regret over the incident — because of an accidental misfiring that took place — that just underscores how deeply Israel cares about avoiding civilian casualties.

Israel still tried to avoid civilian casualties, even though the hospital had served as a headquarters for terrorism. The real blame ultimately lies with the terrorists who deliberately embed themselves among civilians and inside the hospital.

Therefore, instead of libeling Israel, those who seek to protect Nasser Hospital should pressure the terrorists to stop using hospitals as a base of war.

Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.

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