If you know Twitter, you know that there are plenty of racist, discriminatory, and downright unsavory tweets floating around. When you give millions of people the ability to say whatever they want with a few flicks of their thumbs, it’s bound to happen. Now, anti-racism groups in France are eyeing legal action against the social media company for an anti-semitic hashtag that has spawned some particularly nasty communications.
The Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions have been joined by groups like MRAP and SOS Racisme is outrage over the hashtag #unbonjuif, which is French translates to “a good jew.” They accuse Twitter of allowing what them deem a huge “competition of anti-semitic jokes.”
The outrage may prompt legal actions, according to the council.
We are taking this extremely seriously,” said SOS Racisme director Guillaume Ayne. ”There is a deep-rooted anti-Semitism in France, and there is a very small step between racist words and racist acts.”
The hashtag #unbonjuif has reportedly produced tweets featuring images from concentration camps, and other racially-charged statements like “a good jew is a dead jew.”
A quick search of the tag on Twitter reveals what the groups are upset about, for example this tweet:
This isn’t the first time that groups in France have gone after an internet property based on anti-semitic content. Back in June, Google battled with anti-discrimination groups over their autocomplete suggestions. The groups (including SOS Racisme) accused Google of “creating probably the greatest Jewish history file ever” by allowing their autocomplete results to associate many French public figures with the words “jew” or “jewish.” Although Google’s autocomplete results are the work of algorithms based on term popularity and are not hand selected by Google, the search giant eventually settled with the groups.
[Israel National News via The Daily Caller]
[Image Courtesy eclecticlibrarian, Flickr]