Twitter Faces $50M Suit Over Hashtag Haters
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Twitter is being sued for about $50 million in France for failing to honor a court ruling which ordered it to identify users who posted anti-Semitic hate speech.
The Union of Jewish French Students, or UEJF by its French acronym, filed the lawsuit on Wednesday with a Paris correctional tribunal, according to the French news agency AFP.
UEJF President Jonathan Hayoun said his organization filed the lawsuit because the California-based website has “ignored” a civil court ruling from Jan. 24, which gave Twitter two weeks to comply with UEJF’s demand that Twitter identify people who broke France’s laws against hate speech.
As an American company, Twitter argued in court that it adheres to U.S. laws and protected by the First Amendment and the broad free speech liberties it ensures. But the judge said that comments by internet users in France are subject to France’s stricter legislation against racist and hateful expression.
“Twitter is playing the indifference card and does not respect the ruling,” Hayoun told AFP on Wednesday. “They have resolved to protect the anonymity of the authors of these tweets and have made themselves accomplices to racists and anti-Semites.”
UEJF sued Twitter last year shortly after the hashtag “unBonJuif,” French for “aGoodJew,” became the third most popular on French Twitter. A hashtag is a phrase which, when preceded by the symbol #, is used to index relevant tweets. Many users posted Holocaust jokes and calls to kill Jews under #UnBoJuif.
UEJF wants to deposit any damages it is awarded in a trial against Twitter with an organization working to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, AFP reported.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
