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The site indexed thousands of other people and grouped them together after publishing articles about the standoff between Israel and Hamas.
By Ryan Mac
Technology Journalist
Online posts asking for “#PrayForPalestine. ” Pleas for peace. Plea to “liberate Gaza. “
In the past 10 days, an online page called anti-israel-employees. com has posted more than 17,000 posts, which, according to one of the other people on the site, were most commonly from LinkedIn. “A stream of potentially pro-terrorist sentiments among the company’s employees,” indexed thousands of other people and grouped them by workplace, in an obvious attempt to disgrace them for their emotions about the Israel-Hamas conflict.
The website, which was offline for a day before being migrated to a new Internet address, named workers from major foreign companies, including Amazon, Mastercard and Ernst.
Itai Liptz, a hedge fund manager who said he was one of the other people on the original site, said his purpose was to “publicly expose other people who supported Hamas. “
“We wanted this to be documented and recorded,” he said. If I work at this company, but I see my friends on LinkedIn celebrating and praising Hamas, then I don’t feel safe. “
But the site also included posts by others who have not explicitly expressed themselves in favor of Hamas, according to reports in The New York Times. Some others used hashtags like “#GazaUnderAttack” or tried to draw attention to the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. The site asked users to submit posts they felt deserved to be exposed and included a virtual “hate score” for companies.
The site, created 10 days ago, is part of a broader debate about online expression in the context of a tense foreign conflict. Similar lists have also been created to track academics who have spoken out in favor of the Palestinians, while Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, said it had gotten rid of roughly 800,000 pieces of Hebrew and Arabic content for violating its regulations in the three countries, just days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.
Some other people featured on the site have already deleted their LinkedIn posts or profiles. Liptz, who said he didn’t expect the site to be as popular as it became after it spread through WhatsApp groups, called it a mistake to capture all the information. pro-Palestinian sentiment on a giant scale.
“If it says ‘Liberate Palestine,’ it’s perfectly acceptable and we shouldn’t put it on our website,” he said Saturday. “We just have to make sure the filters are there because they have a right to say so. “
However, the site came back online Sunday on a new Web page and still displayed other people’s messages and names, adding that Liptz had announced they would be removed. Now located on an Israel-specific domain, the site is overseen by Guy Ophir, an Israeli lawyer, who said the team moved it to a new address after receiving a suspension and desistance letter from LinkedIn.
A LinkedIn spokesperson said the company decided the site used automated systems to pull content from the platform, a practice known as scraping, which constitutes a violation of its rules. Liptz denied that his site mined the data from LinkedIn, while Ophir said he believes LinkedIn is seeking to infringe on his right to free speech.
“We’re not going to shut down the website,” he said. Here we are in a position to fight them. “
It has been the subject of discussions at Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and LinkedIn, where employees have expressed concerns about the chilling effect it could have on online discourse.
“People are removing pro-Palestinian posts from LinkedIn and adding them to a database of ‘supporters of terrorism,'” one worker wrote last Wednesday in a post on an internal Meta forum that was seen by The Times.
Other Meta workers didn’t understand that expressing aid to Palestine was the same as aiding terrorism.
“The lack of understanding,” wrote one Meta worker, “goes beyond callousness and cruelty. “
Ryan Mac is a generation journalist specializing in corporate assignments in the global tech industry. He won a 2020 George Polk Award for his Facebook policy and is based in Los Angeles. Learn more about Ryan Mac
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