Israel has been playing Internet whack-a-mole, trying to get leaked content taken down since April. As Israeli newspaper Haaretz put it, they are trying “to censor the Internet.”
In April, a hack exposed “tens of thousands of classified files and sensitive emails.” Publicly, Israel downplayed the data, saying that “these are just old documents from an outdated system and no ministry network was actually penetrated.” Even so, Israel has spent a lot of time and energy trying to keep this information from spreading.
What are they trying to hide?
According to Haaretz, “The data speaks for itself: According to official numbers provided by Israel, the Justice Ministry has sent Facebook over 40,000 successful requests to remove ‘illegal content.’ These are not pro-or-anti-Israel posts, but rather content that is illegal by Western standards. Even TikTok has taken down over 20,000 posts flagged by Israel. On Telegram, that number is just over 1,300.”
Israel has worked with any friendly Western government and social network that it can but is having a harder time with content hosted on Russian platforms. Even journalists have been targeted and accounts removed. From Haaretz: “According to a number of sources, the removal of the page shows the dangers and limitations of Israel’s takedown policy, which, casting a wide net against the leaks, risks deploying increasingly harsh censorship mechanisms that harm journalism, many times based on leaked information.”
How long can they resist the open spread of information and how far will they go? And more importantly, does this have anything to do with the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France this weekend? (See next story.)
