Facebook has penalised Benjamin Netanyahu’s election campaign team over hate speech in a post that warned Arab voters were seeking to “destroy” every Israeli man, woman and child.
The message, which the Israeili prime minister’s page automatically shared to voters engaging with his election campaign through Facebook’s Messenger, came as Mr Netanyahu has repeatedly warned, without evidence, that Arab-israeli voters plan to commit large-scale voter fraud in the September 17 polls.
Mr Netanyahu has disavowed the post, which his Likud party said was made in error by a staffer. Facebook’s sanction, in which it suspended the chatbot on his page for 24 hours, was symbolic.
Voters needed to stop the creation of “a secular leftwing weak government that relies on Arabs who want to destroy us all — women, children and men, and will enable a nuclear Iran that will eliminate us”, said the message, first reported by Ha’aretz, the liberal Israeli broadsheet.
“After careful review of the Likud campaign’s bot activities, we found a violation of our hate speech policy,” Facebook said in a statement. “We also found that the bot was misusing the platform in the time period allowed to contact people.”
Mr Netanyahu disowned the message in an interview with an Israeli radio station on Thursday morning. “Think rationally. I am a serious person,” he said. “I have friends in Arab countries. What is this nonsense?”
The page has more than 2.4m followers and is a crucial part of the long-serving prime minister’s campaign to win a fifth term. Polls show that he would struggle to form a governing coalition for the second time this year.
In 2015, he rallied rightwing voters with a similar message, warning that Arabs were heading to the poll in “droves”, and this time round has made the unlikely possibility of Arab-israeli lawmakers joining a possible coalition a central issue in rallying turnout.
He has also appealed to his base with a pledge to extend Israeli sovereignty to parts of the occupied West Bank.
Facebook’s decision came after Ayman Odeh, an Arab-israeli leader who heads the Joint List, an electoral alliance of parties that represents Israelis of Palestinian heritage, complained to the social media company about the campaign’s “racist and dangerous incitement against the Arab population”.
