On Sunday, 26 May the social media giant Meta deleted the Facebook page for Neokohn.hu, a Jewish pro-Israel news site based in Budapest, Hungary. According to the article the editorial staff published about the incident, they have not been informed about the reason for the ban, since the user interface where that information would be available to them also became inaccessible.
Neokohn’s Facebook page had 33,000 followers at the time of its deletion.
According to an article published by the website, Facebook did restore the page on Wednesday, 29 May, but did not allow its owners to create or share any new posts. As of now, the page is accessible through Facebook’s internal search engine. However, the page owners have not been able to create or share new posts since 26 May. A Google search links to the page’s old URL, where users are greeted with the message: ‘This content isn’t available right now’.
Neokohn staff has said that they had received punitive restrictions before, artificially curtailing their reach on the site. The last piece of information they got about that is that their content ‘went against the community guidelines’ of Facebook. Interestingly, they had previously been punished by the Meta-owned site for supposedly promoting the ISIS terrorist group, not something a Jewish news organization is likely to do…
The writers also claimed that some of their articles have been labeled as ‘dangerous content’ before, despite their being about topics widely covered by others in the Hungarian media. Some were even news bulletins originally published by the Hungarian state news agency MTI.
Their suspicion is that the hostile move is the result of an antisemitic, pro-Palestine mass flagging campaign,
in which users supporting Palestinians in the Israeli-Hamas war report pages en masse, triggering punishment from the algorithm. Human review within Facebook should provide the remedy in such cases, but, especially in the case of right-wing media, it does not necessarily do so.
Chief Rabbi Slomó Köves of the United Hungarian Jewish Congregation (EMIH) has had similar troubles with his Facebook page. However, his has been fully restored since, and he is also allowed to post and share new content with his 10,000 followers again. Rabbi Köves has not commented on the issue on his page since, simply writing: ‘We’ve returned’ after the lifting of the ban.
Earlier this month, prominent Dutch conservative commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek’s speech made at CPAC Hungary 2024 was deleted by YouTube for ‘hate speech,’ in a similar instance censorship of right-wing creators by big tech. The Hungarian right-wing news site PestiSrácok was banned from Facebook in November 2023 as well, but their staff has created a new page since.
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