The Dilemma of Anti-Semitic Speech Online
Tech companies are struggling to face a culture their platforms helped create, as trolls post racist, vile content in a way that camouflages dangerous people.
Robert Bowers, the alleged Pittsburgh synagogue killer, had an online life like many thousands of anti-Semitic Americans. He had Twitter and Facebook accounts and was an active user of Gab, a right-wing Twitter knockoff with a hands-off approach to policing speech. The Times of Israel reported that among anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and slurs, Bowers had recently posted a picture of “a fiery oven like those used in Nazi concentration camps used to cremate Jews, writing the caption ‘Make Ovens 1488F Again,’” a white-supremacist reference.
Then he made one last post, saying, “I’m
