Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Sweden puts Israel's MFA and ambassador on social media blacklist (update)

The only ambassador 'mistakenly' blocked by Sweden and accused of engaging in "baiting, threats, hatred and incitement against immigrants, women and LGBTQ-persons, but also against organizations that are committed to human rights"?  

Update via The Jewish Chronicle:

Isaac Bachman
A Swedish government agency has apologised for blocking Israel’s ambassador to Stockholm on Twitter, after wrongly flagging the account as having engaged in hate speech. 
The Swedish Institute published an apology for blocking Isaac Bachman and thousands of other Twitter users, on its website on Tuesday. 
By blocking the accounts of some 14,000 users on Twitter the Swedish Institute prohibited people from mentioning its user name @Sweden and reading its Twitter feed. 
The institute confirmed all the blocks had been removed from all accounts that had been suspended. The statement on its website read: “The Swedish Institute apologises to those who have been blocked mistakenly.”
read more

Via The Jerusalem Post:
Sweden has blocked the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Israel's Ambassador to Sweden Isaac Bachman on social media, placing the government office and the envoy on a list naming the entities blocked on Twitter by the state for disseminating hate speech online.  
The full list of users who are allegedly engaged or could potentially engage in online slander was composed by the Swedish public agency The Swedish Institute, which operates under the authority of the Swedish Foreign Office. 
Among the individuals on the list are parliamentarians from different parties in Sweden as well as journalists and public figures, according to Swedish online newspaper Nyheter Idag.  
The Swedish Institute provided an explanation on its official website, saying that: "Approximately 12,000 international Swedish accounts that engage in baiting, threats, hatred and incitement against immigrants, women and LGBTQ-persons, but also against organizations that are committed to human rights [have been blocked]." 
"These accounts often have a right-wing extremist and/or a neo-Nazi tendency, and they also incite to violence," the Swedish Institute added.  (...) 
Isaac Bachman, Israel's Ambassador to Sweden, responded to the ban on Tuesday, and took to Twitter to express his dismay over his inclusion in the list. "Now, that #Israel's MFA and ambassador are blocked- #Sweden is much safer in reading Iran and others, that were not blocked," the ambassador wrote in a jab aimed at the Swedish Institute. 
read more

No comments :

Post a Comment