US/World News

Twitter responds to lawsuit over tweets

(JNS.org) Twitter has released data identifying users to French authorities in response to a January ruling by a French court regarding anti-Semitic tweets posted in October 2012 under the hashtag #unbonjuif (#agoodjew). The hashtag was trending as the third-most tweeted subject in France, with tweets such as “a good Jew is a dead Jew.” When a French court decided last January that Twitter must reveal the identities of users who sent out those antisemitic tweets, Twitter, which is bound by U.S. free speech laws, initially refused to release the data. France’s Union of Jewish Students (UEJF) then sued Twitter for 38.5 million euros. “Social media is becoming more and more of a problem for us if you look at antisemitism,” Ronald Eissens, co-founder of the Dutch anti-racism group Magenta and the International Network Against Cyber Hate (INACH, told JNS.org in February. “There’s a lot of it around. Prosecution is a lot harder because most social media are based firmly in the U.S.”

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