A popular Canadian political Facebook page that promotes the far-right Jewish Defence League uses a deceptive technique that evades Facebook’s content bans and drives traffic to anti-Muslim websites. For months, the Never Again Canada page has been sharing links that appear to send users to sites hosted on Google’s Blogspot blogging platform, such as fpf-blog.blogspot.com. Between the Facebook page and Never Again Canada’s Twitter feed, the group has a large platform to push out political messaging — and amplifies that message through synchronized posting with dozens of other anti-Muslim Facebook pages. Link redirection is a common technique used to share domains on Facebook that would otherwise be blocked by the platform. Two statements posted on Never Again Canada’s website denounce hate speech and “the general disparagement of Muslims,” yet many posts on the Facebook page cross the line into Islamophobic rhetoric.

Source: thestar April 12, 2019 22:30 UTC