ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt spoke recently about how he has worked with Silicon Valley tech elites to crush speech he finds offensive.
In a February 26 panel hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, Greenblatt announced that he has worked with big tech companies like Google, YouTube, and Facebook in order to restrict what people are allowed to say online. He emphasized his goal was to, “protect users right to not be harassed or hated.”
Greenblatt claimed he worked with “Google and Google AI” to try to “interrupt cyber hate before it happens.” This is reminiscent of a similar project by HateLab, which scans social media to “predict” hate crime, also similar to the concept of “pre-crime” in science fiction thriller “Minority Report.”
He alleged he has negotiated with YouTube to “get them to change their algorithms so it lessens the likelihood that a young person’s going to run into some of these anti-Semitic conspiratorial videos.”
This is important because it specifically shows that algorithms are capable of being biased based upon who programs them and for what purpose — particularly against conservatives. Ironically, Democrat-Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made this exact argument when she was claiming algorithms can have ”racial inequities" and "bias."
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Greenblatt directly stated that “there are different ways they can tweak their algorithms and adjust their products.” He cited the “right” to not be hated, but there is no such right in the U.S. Constitution.
If anything, such a concept is antithetical to the 1st Amendment freedom of speech itself. The idea of protecting people from being harassed is a slippery slope, considering how some consider polite disagreement or memes on Twitter to be “harassing” behavior.
Finally he mentioned he has worked with Facebook on “trying to use a redirect method so when you search for Holocaust as a hoax” so that it takes users to Yad Vashem — The World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
He not only equated words with violence, but went so far as to say they can be far worse. He said, “Because you know the school principal says its not really ‘bullying’ because no one has a bloody nose… the abuse online can be far far worse than anything physical.” He added that there needs to be more restrictions. “We need legislators to catch up and fill some of the gaps,” he argued.
Greenblatt criticized online conservatives as being “anti-Semitic” for critiquing liberal billionaire George Soros. He claimed “George Soros is patient zero for the anti-Semites.” He argued that use of social media has enabled “this kind of hate in ways which heretofore were impossible to imagine.”
Actually, Soros has been critiqued because he is a top liberal donor who has given hundreds of millions of dollars to liberal causes and candidates. He’s ranked No. 8 among “Top Individual Contributors” for the 2018 election, according to Open Secrets. He donated roughly $19 million to Democrats that election.
Greenblatt also cited phrases like “caravan” and “open borders,” as “literally white supremacist phrases that have worked their way through the system.” Essentially, he equated standard conservative arguments to white supremacy.
Like many liberals, he condemned the meme culture of young conservatives online by saying that, “Using these memes and repeating this rhetoric creates the conditions in which anti-Semitism has gone from being a bug in the system to a prevailing part of the social context.” Much like the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ADL has become yet another left-wing anti-conservative organization that seeks to use its once noble reputation to target conservative speech online.
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