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It’s rare that a lawsuit filed halfway around the world is of interest here in the United States. But in our increasingly digital-driven world, a new case before an Israeli court bears watching.
On Monday, relatives of victims who perished in the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens filed a class action suit in Tel Aviv District Court against Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. The plaintiffs are upset these platforms livestreamed videos showing their loved ones’ violent murder.
And they’re deadly serious, too – seeking 4 billion Israeli shekels (or $1.15 billion in U.S. dollars) in damages.
As dawn broke that fateful Saturday, Hamas insurgents unleashed a rain of rockets on various targets, immediately followed by a ground offensive that made no distinction between the Israeli Defense Forces and civilians. It was a multi-hour orgy of atrocities which included rape, torture, and murder – with the victims infants and the elderly among the victims. The nearly 1,200 deaths made it the single largest daily Jewish death toll since the Holocaust. Additionally, some 251 others were taken hostage (of whom 74 either died in captivity or were reported dead).
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No one had to wait for word of the atrocities that day, though, because people all over the world were able to watch them live in real time as they happened.
The motion filed by the victim’s relatives claims the social media behemoth played a part in those outrages by permitting them to be livestreamed on its various platforms. That, the relatives argue, violated users’ privacy rights by bombarding them with highly sensitive content – thus making it, the motion insists, inseparable from the actual attack.
“The horrific images of terror and pain are forever ingrained in the minds of these families as the last moments their loved ones had on earth,” the motion noted, claiming their pain will linger as long as videos of their demise are available online.
Of particular concern is the fact that many of the livestreams showing acts of torture and murder remained live and could readily be viewed for several hours without intervention that day. According to the motion, public digital spaces claim to be safe for public consumption – but failed to deliver that on October 7, 2023.
“It’s an intriguing case,” one South Carolina attorney told us. “It really tests the moral obligations of social media platform operators as well as their direct liability. Meta’s timeline of its actions that day will be critical to its defense. A social site can’t be held accountable for the content a user puts up. But it should be held accountable if it fails to take it down once it’s made aware of it.”
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Signers of the motion included a family in a kibbutz whose 18-year-old daughter was held hostage for several hours and then killed.
“Her horrific murder, and the entire attack, was livestreamed on Facebook for the whole world to see,” the motion stated, adding that the girl’s family learned what had happened to her by chance while reading Facebook.
News services report Meta released this response: “Our hearts go out to the families affected by Hamas terrorism. Our policy designates Hamas as a proscribed organization, and we remove content that supports or glorifies Hamas or the October 7 terrorist attack.”
Because of social media’s worldwide presence, although the matter is pending in Israel, attorneys, corporations, and governments everywhere are keeping a close eye on it.
Television’s arrival in the 1950s and explosive growth in the 1960s made the world a global village. Social media has shrunk it to a universal neighborhood – with the limits of Big Tech’s responsibility for those people within it now being put to the legal test.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
J. Mark Powell is an award-winning former TV journalist, government communications veteran, and a political consultant. He is also an author and an avid Civil War enthusiast. Got a tip or a story idea for Mark? Email him at mark@fitsnews.com.
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1 comment
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” – William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)
Knowing how our CIA and MOSSAD work together in various endeavors, I cannot help but question in my own mind, how real October 7th was or was not. That it has been milked by Bibi, both for sympathy, as well as military and financial support, is without question. That there were apparent deliberate lapses and holes in Israeli security that day, also is without question.
The Casey quote at the top of my post keeps ringing loudly in my ears.