LinkedIn claims Anti-Israel-Employee.com used scrapping to acquire data
ALBAWABA – A group of pro-Israel investors and activists launched a website last week, called Anti-Israel-Employee, intended to publicly “shame” and record employees at major companies in the Middle East who express anti-Israel, pro-Hamas and pro-Palestine sentiments on social media.
LinkedIn issued a warning for users of the professional network platform, explaining how Anti-Israel-Employee.com took posts mostly and mainly from LinkedIn, The New York Times reported.
The website was down for a day before relaunching on Sunday under a new domain address.
According to one of the founders, “the far-ranging capture of all pro-Palestinian sentiment”, which is what the website does at the moment, was “a mistake”.
Itai Liptz, a hedge fund manager who told The New York Times he was one of the people behind the original site, said on Saturday that its goal was to “expose people who supported Hamas publicly”.
However, the site also highlighted posts from people who did not explicitly show support for Hamas.
Anti-Israel-Employee.com is really an anti-Palestine, bullying instrument
Many of the posts seen by AlBawaba featured hashtags like “FreePalestine”, “GazaUnderAttack” and “GazaGenocide”. Even posts such as “PrayFor Gaza” were reported on the website.
More so, the site asked users to submit posts that they believed should be exposed, assuring them that their report will remain anonymous.
The New York Times also reported that the website included a numeric “hate score” for companies.
Anti-Israel-employee.com targets employees in global, local and regional companies and organizations who express support or sympathy for Palestine or Palestinians on social media - AlBawaba
Several people in the United States and around the world have lost their jobs, or have faced discipline or backlash, for their online posts criticizing Israel. And the website has helped put the spotlight on a number of other employees in major tech companies like Amazon and even Meta, the Washington Post reported, many of whom have lost their jobs.
Liptz reaffirmed that the point of the website was not to bully pro-Palestine sentiment, despite the fact that it has derailed from its original objective.
People posting stuff like “FreePalestine” should not be on the website, “because they have the right to say that,” he said. The website should only target people who support Hamas, Liptz insisted.
“We just want to make sure the filters are there” so that people do not end up being chastised just for supporting Palestine, even though they did not express their support for Hamas.
Yet, the website still displayed the posts and names of people that Mr. Liptz had said would be removed, who voiced solidarity or support for Gaza or Palestine but not Hamas.
From reporting pro-Hamas sentiment to shaming anti-Israel, pro-Palestine posts: Anti-Israel-Employee.com
By all means, the anti-Israel-employee website became just another tool used to bully pro-Palestine activists, encompassing all, from pro-Hamas to pro-Palestine and Gaza sympathisers all the same.
“People are scraping pro-Palestine LinkedIn posts and adding them to a database of ‘terror supporters,’” one employee wrote last Wednesday in a note on an internal Meta message board that was seen by The New York Times.
“The lack of understanding,” another Meta employee wrote on the board, “is beyond insensitive and cruel”.
So far, the website has recorded more than 23 thousand posts from employees in more than 12 thousand global, regional and local organizations, including Careem, Arab Bank and EY.
A spokesman for LinkedIn said the company determined that the site had used automated programs to extract content from the platform. This practice, known as scraping, is a violation of LinkedIn rules. But Liptz denied that the site helped build extracted LinkedIn information through scraping.
