LONDON (Labour Buzz) – Labour has accused Facebook of failing to act against supporters of hate groups. The party said that despite spending the last six months alerting the social media platform to 11 different groups in which antisemitic content was shared, nothing had been done.

One of the groups which has caused particular concern is one which declares itself a ‘pro Labour’ group set up in 2010 before Jeremy Corbyn was elected as leader. In this group, one individual, called Mossabir Ali, who was expelled for antisemitism has been sending a constant feed of common antisemitic tropes.

Sources within Labour said that the party’s Governance and Legal Unit had contacted Facebook in August 2019 to raise their concerns about the groups. The meeting was a follow up from an earlier attempt by General Secretary Jennie Formby as far back as 2018 to compel moderators of Labour supporting Facebook groups to provide more oversight over their platforms to ensure antisemitic and other racist content was removed from the platform.

However, while there have been a few improvements, Labour claims racist content is still being circulated around many of these groups.

In October, 2019 Labour gave Facebook four reports of more than 100 pages detailing actions of the 11 groups. These included 250 pieces of evidence showing how antisemitic content was shared and pinpointing the key individuals responsible.

Facebook only took action a month later, after prominent campaigner Rachel Riley submitted evidence about one of these groups entitled ‘Truthers Against Zionist Lobbies”. This was more than two years after the Community Security Trust first alerted Facebook to its presence.

The party are obviously concerned about the apparent failure of Facebook to act against the groups and said they had arranged a further meeting with Facebook on 11th February 2020 to provide more evidence.

In each case, Labour says it believes the content met the criteria Facebook sets for offensive content, specifically towards Jews. Facebook, they said, had assured them it would look at the reports again, but have yet to respond.

Facebook’s failure to report the content was also featured in Confronting the Holocaust Denial in which David Baddiel met with Facebook’s head of policy solutions Baron Richard Allen who was a Lib Dem MP and is now a peer.

He defended Facebook’s position on the basis that they did not wish to censor things which ‘different people get wrong’.

A source for the Labour party said: “The party is taking action against individual Labour members over antisemitism but we don’t have the power to police the internet. Facebook needs to step up to stamp out hate on their platform.”

Facebook, for their part, said that it has a set of rules which makes it clear that there is “absolutely no place for hate speech on Facebook,” and had removed multiple accounts.

“We are currently exploring what additional steps we can take to enhance our rules in this area, particularly in cases like this which involve hateful stereotypes,” said the spokesman.

More on how the press bias, including news spread via Facebook has damaged Labour’s changes of forming a government.

(Written by Tom Cropper, edited by Michael O’Sullivan)