Victory in Spain: Legal action brings removal of online anti-Semitic content

The Lawfare Project has scored a small victory in their combat against sites hosting and promoting anti-Semitic content.

By: World Israel News Staff

Under threat of legal action in Spain for hosting content that promotes Holocaust denial and virulent anti-Semitism, Yahoo and Google removed some of the content, a victory in a battle which is part of a very long war.

The Lawfare Project announced on Friday that it has brought about the removal of illegal online anti-Semitic content in Spain, part of its ongoing legal initiative to combat anti-Semitism throughout Europe.

The Lawfare Project sent cease and desist letters to Google and Yahoo, as well as to hosting companies and a domain registration company which is a subsidiary of WordPress. These companies all provided online access to materials which, The Lawfare Project argued, violate Spanish law.

The authors of three of the materials at issue took down the content after receiving the cease and desist letters from The Lawfare Project’s Spanish counsel, Ignacio Wenley Palacios.

Two of the items removed were articles published on some of Spain’s most popular conspiracist websites, denying the Holocaust while simultaneously blaming Jews for Nazi atrocities. The third was a thread in a forum that spread the medieval style blood libel that Jews carry out ritual murders of children.

One of the authors of the removed content has been identified as the leader of a Spanish far-right coalition. He has been a panelist at several Holocaust denial conferences in Tehran and publishes material denying the crimes of the Syrian regime. Palacios also reported a Facebook post by this individual and is awaiting Facebook’s response.

In February, The Lawfare Project announced that it had sent cease and desist letters to tech firms in Spain demanding they take action to combat the proliferation of extreme anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial content on their platforms.

Tech giants with offices in Spain — including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter — have yet to take adequate action. Google and Yahoo continue to promote Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on their search engines, the Lawfare Project noted, while Twitter and Facebook have not responded to requests to remove violently anti-Semitic social media posts.

The Lawfare Project has vowed to file lawsuits against them if they do not take “rapid action.”

“We are determined to take further steps to demand the enforcement of the law from search engines and social media platforms, and we will file lawsuits if they continue to tolerate blatantly racist and offensive content when they have been effectively informed by detailed take-down notices,” Palacios stated.

Internet giants have previously faced similar legal actions in several other countries.