Bulletins

Anti-Palestine mob violence is organizing on WhatsApp in Israel

Anti-Palestinian hate groups are using WhatsApp groups to organize mob violence against Palestinians living in Israel, according to a New York Times investigation.

Groups organizing street brawls and attacking and beating Palestinians and Arab Israelis have used WhatsApp to coordinate times and are adding hundreds of members every day, the NYT reported. Israeli misinformation research group FakeReporter helped the NYT document the groups. "It is a perfect storm of people empowered to use their own names and phone numbers to openly call for violence, and having a tool like WhatsApp to organize themselves into mobs," Achiya Schatz, director of FakeReporter, told the Times.

 Anna Kramer

Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (Twitter: @ anna_c_kramer, email: akramer@protocol.com), where she writes about labor and workplace issues. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.

whatsapp misinformation
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