LinkedIn warns website that shamed #FreeGaza posts

Site is accused of scraping social networks to highlight people posting pro-Palestinian hashtags

LinkedIn has been largely shielded from issues faced by other social media platforms with regard to the content posted by users, but in recent years, it has seen a surge in users and engagement. ReuteShow more

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LinkedIn has sent a cease and desist letter to a website, Anti-Israel-Employees.com, accusing it of violating the professional networking site's policies around data scraping, a tactic in which automated software can be used to lift information from various sites.

The cease and desist, first reported by The New York Times, comes amid criticisms that Anti-Israeli-Employees.com unfairly highlighted various users who used hashtags such as #FreeGaza and #PrayForPalestine, and mentioned their place of employment.

“Using automated tools to scrape LinkedIn violates our terms of service,” a representative for the Microsoft-owned site wrote in response to questions from The National. “And we work to notify sites when they do.”

At one point, the website boasted “22,849 mentions from employees in 12,697 global companies”.

Anti-Israeli-Employees.com, which billed itself as a “global live feed of potentially supportive sentiments for terrorism and/or anti-Semitic publications and/or anti Israeli publications among company employees”, went live shortly after October 7 when the militant group Hamas launched attacks on southern Israel.

According to The New York Times, one of the creators of the site, Itai Liptz, said the purpose was to highlight people who were supporting Hamas.

Although the site was originally hosted by servers in the US, according to WhoIs.com, it was later transferred to servers in Israel, and registered to Guy Ophir, a lawyer who specialises in internet, cyber law, defamation and intellectual property, among other legal areas.

Mr Ophir told The New York Times that he felt LinkedIn was trying to infringe on freedom of speech, and in an earlier interview, Mr Liptz denied the scraping allegations from LinkedIn.

As of writing, the site, Anti-Israel-Employee.co.il is not active, but it was for several days after being transferred to new servers, where it also has a slightly different website address to reflect the country where it is registered.

Across the board, social media and Big Tech companies have been faced with an unprecedented amount of criticism over how they handle content as the crisis in Gaza intensifies.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, acknowledged that some posts about the conflict were receiving lower reach, attributing the problem to a technical glitch.

“This bug affected accounts equally around the globe – not only people trying to post about what’s happening in Israel and Gaza – and it had nothing to do with the subject matter of the content. We fixed this bug as quickly as possible,” the company said in a statement.

The accusations of scraping social media sites, however, pose different problems for tech companies, as users often depend on a certain privacy threshold when they post.

LinkedIn, with its professional and occupational emphasis, has been largely shielded from the issues faced by other social media platforms with regard to the content posted by users. However, in recent years it has seen a surge in users and engagement, with users posting personal reflections, pictures and news content.