By JTA
The Union of Jewish Students of France, which last month sued the popular short messaging service Twitter for hosting anti-Semitic content, has lodged a fresh complaint against the company and accused it of lying. On 12 April UEJF filed a complaint with the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office against Twitter President and Director Dick Costolo. UEJF and another group said in the complaint that Costolo was “responsible for racial defamation and publicly inciting to discrimination, hate or violence toward Jews.”
The complaint concerns tweets which appear on Twitter and which call for killing Jews and praising the Holocaust. UEJF last month sued Twitter for US$ 50 million after Twitter failed to honor a ruling from January by a French judge who ordered the company to divulge within 14 days details of users who posted anti-Semitic statements. The ruling was on a lawsuit brought by UEJF against Twitter, which is an American California-based company.
France and other European countries have laws against hate speech that are considerably stricter than in the United States,, where the First Amendment to the Constitution ensures free speech in a much wider spectrum.
In its ruling, the Paris court also ordered Twitter to set up a system for flagging and removing hate messages, but UEJF said Twitter had not complied. Additionally, the Jewish student union accused Twitter of lying when it reportedly announced in October that it will remove similar tweets. The tweets were still available to any user who did not self-identify as being French, UEJF said.
Despite the tweets still being available, the weekly French magazine 'Le Nouvel Observateur' reported last October that Twitter announced it had removed the tweets. It followed public outrage that erupted after the phrase #UnBonJuif (meaning “A Good Jew”) became the third most popular 'hashtag' on French Twitter thanks to what 'Le Monde' termed “a competition of anti-Semitic jokes” that evolved around it.
Twitter did not respond to JTA's request for a comment on the latest Union of Jewish Students of France complaint.
