The Jew Watch Controversy Study File

JEW WATCH AND THE INTERNET

[politicalsoldier.net says: Will JDL, ADL, JDO and other mad
extremist Jewish sites be labelled as 'hate' sites?]:

Who can define 'Jew?' Internet flap shows challenge of the
digital age
By Joe Berkofsky

NEW YORK, April 27 (JTA) - In 1999, at the height of the
Internet boom, the Anti-Defamation League warned that scores
of neo-Nazis and white supremacists were going online.

In a report titled, "Poisoning the Web: Hatred Online," the ADL
quoted Don Black, an ex-convict and former KKK organizer,
who is credited with building the first Internet hate site. By 1997,
the site had grown into what the report called a "supermarket" of
racist invective on the Web by linking to many other like-minded
efforts.

Among those Black linked to was a Missourian named Frank
Weltner, a.k.a. "Von Goldstein Mohammed," who set up a
small site called "Jew Watch" that alleged a host of Jewish
conspiracies.

Last month "Jew Watch" made the big time, suddenly placing
at the top of searches for the word "Jew" on the search engine
giant Google.

That sparked a media blitz, as well as an online furor among
those who wanted to quash the site. The digital storm seemed
fueled not only by Jew Watch's improbable ranking, but by the
possibility of an initial public stock offering for Google, which
many hope will revive the Internet economy.

As of midweek, Jew Watch no longer turned up in response to
the "Jew" query, but it did turn up in searches for its title, along
with a Google disclaimer about "offensive search results."
 
Google said that it wouldn't remove the Jew-hating site from its
listings, but it did promise to reconsider how the search engine
categorizes and labels search results.

"We do our best to extrapolate what the Web determines is the
best result for a particular query, and the Web represents the
widest range of opinions imaginable," Google spokesman
David Krane said.

Call it the rise and fall of Jew Watch.

The strange journey began with a report in j., the Jewish news
weekly of Northern California, followed by stories in the New
York Times, New York Post, Jerusalem Post, Reuters and such
top computer news sites as Cnet.A New York real estate investor,
Steven Weinstock, launched a "RemoveJewWatch.com" petition
hoping to convince Google to remove the offending site.

Though Weinstock told JTA he opposes censorship, he said he
appealed to Google's sense of corporate responsibility in urging
the company to suppress Jew Watch. He urged some 40 friends
to e-mail Google through his protest site.

By this week, he'd received 118,316 replies, he said, and some
12,000 e-mails. "I do believe in the First Amendment, but
corporations should have some responsibilities," he said.

Google replied that it wouldn't intervene or tinker with its search
results. "Petitions don't impact Google's ranking technology,"
Krane told JTA. Google determines its results by a kind of digital
democracy. When a user begins a search by entering key words or
phrases, computer algorithms search the Web for appearances of
those words and return each page according to popularity, or what
Google calls relevancy.

That was until Daniel Sieradski, editor of "Jewschool," a Web log
of "Jewish news from the fringe," arrived.
 
Sieradski launched a "Google Bomb," a campaign in which many
sites link to a single site with the aim of moving it up Google's
 rankings.

The Jewschool-led offensive pointed to the online encyclopedia
"Wikipedia." Within weeks, Wikipedia's definition of the word
"Jew" became the first result for that search term.

In the meantime, Jew Watch's Web hosting service apparently
shut the site down for nearly a week. By the time a well-known
neo-Nazi site allowed Jew Watch to use its Web service, the
absence had pushed its rankings down on Google, several
eople said.

Sieradski is satisfied with the outcome - "the Jewish people
have a right to defend ourselves before our detractors define
us for us," he said - but he doesn't plan to make the fight against
Jew Watch his "life's mission."

"There are tons and tons of sites out there and we can't police
them all," he told JTA.

Sieradski said he'd leave that job to those like "Internet Haganah,"
a site that fights anti-Israel Islamic sites on the Internet. Meanwhile,
several neo-Nazi sites have begun a "counter-Google Bomb"
against Jewschool, Sieradski noted.

Others have joined the fray, including Sen. Charles Schumer,
(D-N.Y.), who called on Google to retool its results, and the
ADL, which urged Google to red-flag Jew Watch and similar sites.

As a result, Google's co-founder, Sergey Brin, a Stanford graduate
and Russian Jew, sent the ADL a letter pledging to re-examine how
it classifies Web sites.

Google will not censor any site save for those that remain illegal,
such as child pornography sites, Krane said, but it would consider
returning to a modified version of its old practice of categorizing
 each Web page.Under that system, Jew Watch was tagged "hate/hate

   

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