(Communicated by the Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Spokesman)

March 31, 2011

Attached is a letter from Facebook Director of Policy Richard Allan to
Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Minister Yuli Edelstein regarding the
latter’s 23.2.11 letter

http://israelbehindthenews.com/bin/content.cgi?ID=4330&q=1

to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the Facebook “Third Palestinian Intifada
Page”.

=============

30th March 2011

Reply from Facebook to letter from Minister Edelstein

Dear Minister Edelstein,

Thank you for your letter to Mark Zuckerberg concerning a Page on Facebook
entitled” The Third Palestinian Intifada”. Mark has asked me to reply on his
behalf as I manage Facebook’s relationships with governments in Europe, the
Middle East and Africa.

We reviewed the Page in question extensively in response to several reports
we received including your own. Our reviewers felt that the content of the
Page began as a call for peaceful protest, even though the term Intifada has
been associated with violence in the past. In addition, the administrators
initially removed comments that promoted violence. Under these conditions a
Page of this nature would normally be permitted to remain on Facebook.

However,after the publicity of the Page more comments deteriorated to
direct calls for violence. Eventually, the administrators also participated
in these calls.After administrators of the page received repeated warnings
about posts that violated our policies, we removed the Page yesterday.

We continue to believe that people on Facebook should be able to express
their opinions, and we do not typically take down content that speaks out
against countries, religions, political entities, or ideas. However, we
monitor Pages that are reported to us and when they degrade to direct calls
for violence or expressions of hate – as occurred in this case – we have and
will continue to take them down.

We are aware that there have been reports of a number of copycat pages on
the site and will similarly review reports related to this content and take
appropriate action in accordance with our community standards.

We have been in touch with your spokesperson Gal Ilan throughout this
process of initial and further review and this contact has been very helpful
in working through this issue.

Thank you again for your interest in Facebook.

Yours sincerely,

Richard Allan
Director of Policy EMEA Facebook

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