One hundred thirty-five social media posts reaching more than 15.4 million users have denied the sexual violence and rapes perpetuated by Hamas, reinforcing rape culture across all major platforms, according to a report conducted by technology non-profit CyberWell. “Social media platforms must be a safe space for women — all women — and not promulgate voices that deny the experiences of victims of sexual assault and applaud their abusers — in this case, Hamas terrorists,” said CyberWell Founder and Executive Director Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor in a press release. “Platforms must equally enforce their existing hate speech and sexual violence policies, recognize denial of October 7 sexual assault as prohibitive content and remove these posts at scale.”CyberWell uses artificial intelligence technology to monitor for posts in English and Arabic violating the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism, which its analysts report to platform moderators along with the community standards and hate speech policies they violate. When posts meet antisemitic guidelines falling outside of established policies, it releases contextualized guidance to social media companies so they can better moderate content. CyberWell warned social media platform moderators have not done enough to remove posts about sexual violence inflicted by Hamas on women and girls in October. The six trends it noted when documenting the denials were no rape survivors had recounted their experiences; survivors and first responders testifying to acts of sexual violence they witnessed or identified were lying; news outlets that report on them were spreading fake news; Israel was accusing Hamas of rape for personal gain; its militants are driven by religious Muslim ideology; and the Israelis raped their own people. Of the 135 posts CyberWell’s AI technology flagged and were verified by human analysts to deny sexual violence, it found 49% were posted on Twitter. After Twitter was Facebook (27%). This was followed by TikTok (13%), Instagram (6%), and YouTube (4%). Two-thirds of the posts were in English and the others were posted in Arabic. Moderators for each of the platforms did respond by removing 24% of flagged posts on Facebook, 20% on YouTube, 12.5% on TikTok, and 1.5% on Twitter. “Despite Hamas terrorists documenting their atrocities and livestreaming and uploading videos and photos onto social media platforms, extremists on social media quickly began denying the very fact of the sexual assault — narratives that gained traction and continue to be spread online today,” said Cohen Montemayor. Ontario independent MPP Sarah Jama (Hamilton Centre) denied in November Israeli women were raped and babies beheaded by Hamas terrorists and said Zionists control the Canadian government. READ MORE: WATCH: Sarah Jama denies Israeli women raped by Hamas“Sarah, please see below (a threaded post),” said HonestReporting Canada..Jama said the harm Israel has suffered during its conflict with Hamas “draws a wider picture in terms of the ability of our government to be influenced by the Zionist lobby.”
