ReportingThem

For all the rise in Anti-Semitism that has emerged over a few years gradually and over a few months more rapidly, I had not personally encountered any other than more honorable people retweeting a comment made somewhere on their Twitter screens for the purpose of criticizing what they had seen.  I got my first two yesterday.  They occurred on Reddit's r/Judaism, each just a phrase or a sentence.  Neither had any comments.  I selected the Report option, clicked the Hate icon, then submit.  My email contained two messages from u/reddit that the umpire, which I assume is what u/ designates, agreed that company posting policy had been violated.

Neither of these posts had received any comments from the users who engage in r/judaism.  And since the platform provides neutral names to its users to minimize any personal identification, I could not know anything about the poster.  Could be Islamic, could be American Nazi, could just be a conflict entrepreneur.

In the early days of AOL chat, there were Jewish virtual conversations that I would enter.  We would type about our synagogue, what we are making for Seder, where we are from.  Invariably Abdul would sign in, deface our screens with some anti-Israel or even anti-Jewish slogan, likely for the purpose of disruption.  AOL provided an Ignore option which any of us could click to exclude Abdul, but we would all have to exercise that choice.  If anyone wanted to retort Abdul, where invariably some of the people connected to that chat room at the time would, he would stay and post more slogans or individual demeaning comments.  We had no mechanism for AOL to deny him access.

Reddit, and some of the other platforms, can deny access.  But to do that requires another consumer of the service taking the initiative to make a report, then a process from which an employee of the platform makes a decision on whether company standards have been violated.  Not a lot different than our highways where people can drive in all sorts of hazardous ways, limited only by getting caught, something that happens a relatively small fraction of the time.  Our police have tried to randomize this with sobriety check roadblocks, radar traps, red light photo cameras.  The IRS monitors tax cheats with random audits.  But our electronic platforms really don't seem to have a better mechanism than depending on annoyed legitimate users turning in troublesome posters as individuals.  It's not a good way to clean up the enjoyment these platforms are intended to generate.  Or maybe they do have automated screening devices.  Or maybe they pay people to log onto places that have hateful posters for their version of the random audit.  Whatever the mechanism, it does not seem to be as sophisticated as it should be.