Senators from the Republican Party on a U.S. Senate subcommittee wrote to Meta Platforms, Google, TikTok, and X (previously Twitter) on Friday, asking for details on their content moderation practices regarding the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Republicans wanted businesses to “commit to fully preserving a documentary history of Hamas’ atrocities.”
On October 7th, Palestinian Islamic extremists from Hamas attacked Israel, murdering almost 1,400 people (mostly civilians). Since then, Israel has been carrying out airstrikes against Gaza. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, at least 4,137 Palestinians, including hundreds of children, have been murdered in Gaza.
Hamas has been in control of the 45 km long (25 km) enclave of Gaza, home to 2.3 million people, since 2006. Since Israel established a siege 16 years ago, Gaza has been mostly isolated.
The Republican legislators under the leadership of Senator Ted Cruz declared, “We believe it is imperative that we preserve a full documentary history of Hamas’ atrocities.”
“Ordinarily policies limiting the distribution of disturbing content might make sense, but videos and images uploaded by soldiers, law enforcement, citizens, journalists, and those with real time access to acts of terrorism need to be preserved to aid in prosecuting war crimes, intelligence gathering, media reporting, and the historical record.”
The senators claimed to have asked for various things, including an explanation of how international laws influence these practices and statistics on content deleted routinely without human inspection in the wake of the Israel-Hamas War.
Also, the senators wanted to know what measures the corporations were taking to stop their platforms from being used to offer material assistance to Hamas and how the companies were complying with sanctions programs that mandate the banning of interests of Hamas.
