The ADL is specifically an anti-free speech organization and for some reason, has been able to assume the moral authority to dictate what is and what isn't acceptable speech in much of American society.
The US government is openly allowing this one group to dictate who gets to say what on social media. This is like if the US government had allowed the ADL to say who is or isn't allowed to have a telephone line.
With social media companies allowing the ADL to say who can and can't be on social media, it can be argued that they are directly interfering with commerce, as much of the exchange of goods and services is now done online through social media.
Worse than that, they seem to be a bunch of idiots as well, because they have fallen for online hoaxes posted on 4chan and promoted wild and unfounded conspiracy theories.
How white nationalists fooled the media about Florida shooterABC, AP and others ran with false information on shooter’s ties to extremist groups.
On Thursday afternoon, the Anti-Defamation League reported that a white supremacist group claimed ties with Nikolas Cruz, who confessed to the shooting spree that killed at least 17 people, including many high-school students, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
“A spokesperson for the white supremacist group Republic of Florida (ROF) told the Anti-Defamation League on Thursday, February 15, that Nikolas Cruz [....] was associated with his group,” the ADL reported. The ADL quoted a man named Jordan Jereb, who runs the small group, which is based in Tallahassee.
“Jereb added that ROF had not ordered or wanted Cruz to do anything like the school shooting,” the ADL wrote in a blog post that was quickly picked up by ABC News and The Associated Press, and later percolated through dozens of other media outlets. Even The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, picked up the claim.
Some outlets reported they had their own conversations with Jereb or classmates of Cruz who allegedly corroborated the association of Cruz with ROF.
But a few hours later, after law enforcement agencies said they had no evidence linking Cruz to ROF, Jereb said his identification of Cruz was a “misunderstanding” and that he, too, had been the subject of a “prank.” On online forums and Twitter, trolls and white nationalists gloated at the disinformation they had sowed.
“All of our evidence seems to point to the ADL getting this wrong,” said Joan Donovan, a researcher who tracks online misinformation campaigns for Data & Society, a think tank in New York City.
The ADL subsequently revised its report, as did many news outlets.
"ADL shared information from our experts on extremism and claims from white supremacist that we believed could be helpful to both law enforcement and the public due to the fluid and evolving nature of the events," an ADL spokesperson said in a statement on Friday. "Confirmation of whether Cruz was part of ROF is now in the hands of law enforcement, and that’s what the Broward sheriff’s team is looking into."
These fucking morons could have potentially gotten some innocent arrested and charged, maybe possibly even killed.
Why should we be forced to be told what we can and can't say by agenda driven idiots who read anonymous posts on 4chan and take them seriously?
Maybe they believed the anonymous 4chan hoax without any supporting evidence or maybe they intentionally fed that to news outlets to push their secret white nationalists conspiracy theories in news articles.
They also appear to be racist ethno-nationalists who spies on people based on their race and ethnicity, which is kinda odd since they accuse any white Americans who act on behalf of their country and ethnicity to be literally the worst thing since Adolf Hitler himself.
Arab-Americans Sue Anti-Defamation League Over Alleged SpyingSAN FRANCISCO (AP) _ Arab-Americans and critics of Israel sued the Anti-Defamation League on Wednesday, saying it invaded their privacy by illegally gathering information about them through a nationwide spy network.
The ADL, a national group dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, intended to use the data to discredit them because of their political views, according to the class-action lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court.
″None of us has been guilty of racism or Nazism or anti-Semitism or hate crimes, or any of the other ‘isms’ that the ADL claims to protect against. None of us is violent or criminal in any way,″ said Carol El-Shaieb, an education consultant who develops programs on Arab culture.
The 19 plaintiffs include Yigal Arens, son of former Israel Defense Minister Moshe Arens. The younger Arens, a research scientist at the University of Southern California, said the ADL kept a file on him in the 1980s presumably because he has criticized Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
″The ADL believes that anyone who is an Arab American ... or speaks politically against Israel is at least a closet anti-Semite,″ Arens said.
The ADL has denied any wrongdoing, but couldn’t comment on the lawsuit because it hasn’t reviewed it, said a spokesman at the ADL’s New York headquarters.
The FBI and local police and prosecutors are investigating allegations that the ADL spied on thousands of individuals and hundreds of groups, including white supremacist and anti-Semitic organizations, Arab-Americans, Greenpeace, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and San Francisco public television station KQED.
Some information allegedly came from confidential police and government records, according to court documents filed in the probe and the civil lawsuit. No charges have been filed in the criminal investigation.
The lawsuit accuses the ADL of violating California’s privacy law, which forbids the intentional disclosure of personal information ″not otherwise public″ from state or federal records.