While Israeli police smothered Palestinian protests on the streets of East Jerusalem in May 2021, a separate agency attempted its own sweep online. The Cybercrime Department in Israel’s Ministry of Justice sent social media companies lists of thousands of user accounts it wanted removed for violating the services’ content policies with their posts about the protests.
A former Twitter employee says the company suspended a few of the accounts flagged by the Israeli agency for using hateful or harassing language. But policy staffers determined that most were simply Palestinians and others tweeting comments that, while critical of Israel, did not break any rules.
The Israeli cyber department is an example of what scholars of online platforms call an internet referral unit—a government team created to badger online services into taking action against content it doesn’t like. A raft of IRUs have been launched by countries across the world as governments of all kinds grapple with online platforms. Tech companies often prioritize IRU requests in moderation queues, to the concern of critics who say the units can reflect political motivations and often skirt legal hurdles designed to prevent unfair censorship.
After a decade of growing mostly unrestricted, internet referral units are now facing new checks and balances in the US and the EU.
A federal judge in Louisiana this month issued a preliminary injunction banning 41 Biden administration officials and their staff across 10 different US agencies from tipping off social media companies about content thought to violate a service’s terms of use. The ban severely curtailed the White House’s influence on digital town squares through the agencies’ informal IRUs, and it caused the State Department to postpone a planned meeting with Meta to share information on countering disinformation abroad.
In the EU, referral units are set to be subjected to new transparency requirements by one provision of the wide-ranging Digital Services Act that takes effect next year.
The ruling and the law are the first significant disruptions to the coziness that has existed between online platforms and the government agencies and other organizations patrolling the web to quietly suppress unfavorable commentary. But though rights groups that promote freedom of expression have applauded the new interventions, they also warn that IRUs and the moderation decisions they prompt will largely be allowed to continue without adequate controls or disclosures.
Internet referral units first emerged around 2010 in the UK, as services such as Facebook and YouTube faced pressure from counterterrorism officials to better handle content generated by violent Islamic extremists. Companies trying to establish better relations with governments generally accepted the requests and even anointed IRUs as “trusted flaggers,” whose reports of bad content would get reviewed more swiftly than those of standard users.
The numbers and activity of IRUs expanded rapidly. Companies also added civil society organizations as trusted flaggers. Authorities in countries including Germany and France used the tactic to suppress far-right political extremism on social media in the later 2010s, and then health disinformation during the pandemic.
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