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anti-defamation league
ADL-Backed Bipartisan Bill Threatens to Censor Israel Criticism on Social Media
The bill’s lead sponsors described it as part of an effort to prevent antisemitic hate. But their comments during a press conference on the measure suggest it will also target critics of Israel.
Jul 25, 2025
Free speech advocates are raising concerns that a new bipartisan bill would force social media companies to censor criticism of Israel on their platforms.
Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Don Bacon (R-Neb.) rolled out the bill, called the Stopping Terrorists Online Presence and Holding Accountable Tech Entities (STOP HATE) Act, at a press conference Wednesday, alongside Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
The bill would mandate that social media companies work with the federal government to implement moderation policies that curb the speech of groups the government designates as "terrorists." They'd be required to provide regular reports to the U.S. attorney general. Those that don't comply would be fined $5 million each day they refuse.
The lawmakers justified the measure by citing some recent examples of overt antisemitism and calls for violence on social media.
"We've seen an explosion of disinformation and antisemitic hate online in America and around the world," Gottheimer said. "After the shooting outside the Capital Jewish Museum, anti-Zionist extremists used social media to call for further violence, posting messages like 'may all Zionists burn.' Even AI platforms like Grok have posted deeply disturbing content, praising Adolf Hitler and Nazism."
Bacon said, "We want to be in a country that makes clear that antisemitism or any kind of racism is repugnant, unacceptable, not allowed in an online space, and that we have zero tolerance for it."
However, other statements from the lawmakers make clear that their definition of "antisemitism" goes far beyond expressions of hatred or calls for violence against Jewish people.
As Matthew Petti wrote for the libertarian magazine Reason: "The specific idea that Bacon had in mind was antisemitism, and he made clear that it includes criticism of the State of Israel in his book."
At the press conference, Bacon explicitly referenced recent protests against Israel's policy of starvation in Gaza.
"I saw protests out here the last two days, they were vile, right?," he said. "They were...you can see the antisemitism in their comments and how they were treating some of our members of Congress who are Jewish. I saw that firsthand."
Bacon did not specify what specific comments he was referring to. However, Petti noted:
Protesters stormed the congressional cafeteria on July 1 to call for food aid to Gaza, and interrupted Rep. Randy Fine (R–Fla.)—who has called for Palestinians to "starve away"—during a hearing on campus antisemitism last week.
Bacon also suggested that merely stating opposition to pro-Israel congresspeople, including himself, constitutes antisemitism.
"I even saw an article today. It was about me, but talking about we have to oppose congressmen who are pro-Zionists, right?" said Bacon, who is notably not Jewish. "It's all over our social media and it's unacceptable."
Gottheimer, meanwhile, said the policy was not just about combating terrorism, but about halting a "massive disinformation campaign influencing us every day."
Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald—a critic of government efforts to regulate "misinformation"—suggested that the bill flies in the face of the right's supposed commitments to free speech.
"There was [a] full consensus on the Right for the last decade that Big Tech censorship was a great evil, especially if pressured and demanded by the U.S. government," he said on X. "All that changed [when] it came time to censor for Israel."
In a statement released Friday, the American‑Arab Anti‑Discrimination Committee (ADC) likewise described the STOP HATE Act as part of "the continuous efforts by lawmakers to silence, censor, and chill freedom of speech and expression in this country at the behest of Israel."
They warned that the bill gives the government, in tandem with pro-Israel groups like the ADL, "unfettered powers to police private social media companies, attack lawful expression, and levy fines of up to five million dollars each day if companies fail to silence and censor users."
This is not the first time Gottheimer and Bacon have introduced the STOP HATE Act. A similar version, introduced in 2023, died in committee.
When introducing that version of the bill, they were more explicit in their calls for government regulation of media—calling on the Department of Justice to require the news outlets Al Jazeera and its subsidiary AJ+, which are sponsored by the Qatari government, to register as foreign agents.
The two congressmen were also at the forefront of calls for the U.S. government to ban TikTok, which Gottheimer said was being used by the Chinese Communist Party to "boost anti-Israel and pro-Hamas videos in the United States." They have also introduced legislation that would criminalize efforts to boycott Israeli products.
Greenblatt, who spoke alongside the two legislators on Wednesday, has explicitly said that "Anti-Zionism is antisemitism." Though he's faced criticism for this stance, including from members of the ADL itself, he has only continued to double down.
In one infamous exchange during the outbreak of pro-Palestine protests on college campuses in 2024, Greenblatt suggested that students wearing keffiyehs—a kind of scarf commonly worn by Palestinians—were doing the equivalent of wearing a swastika armband.
More recently, he endorsed Immigration and Customs Enforcement's warrantless abduction of pro-Palestine organizer Mahmoud Khalil, who he accused—along with other pro-Palestine demonstrators—of being an asset of foreign governments and likened to Middle Eastern terrorist groups.
Wednesday's press release from the legislators on the STOP HATE Act cites the ADL's 2024 "Social Media Scorecard," as evidence that "the five major social media platforms—Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X—routinely failed to act on antisemitic hate reported to them."
That Scorecard page features a quote from Greenblatt, who said, "Social media platforms are still falling far too short when it comes to moderating antisemitic and anti-Israel content."
After the October 7, 2023 attacks led by Hamas, the ADL changed its methodology to categorize antisemitic incidents to not only include hate speech or threats directed at Jewish people, but also language expressing "opposition to Zionism."
The proposed STOP HATE Act comes at a time when American public opinion has dramatically shifted against Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza. According to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS, released last Friday:
Only 23% of Americans say Israel’s actions have been fully justified, a 27-point drop from a[n] October 2023 poll taken shortly after Hamas’ October 7 attacks. Another 27% now say those actions have been partially justified and 22% say that they have not been justified at all. In October 2023, just 8% said Israel’s actions were not justified at all.
In recent weeks, Israeli leaders have openly called for the mass displacement of two million Palestinians to make room for Jewish settlers. Meanwhile, at least 115 Palestinians—including more than 80 children—have reportedly starved due to Israel's restrictions on aid entering the Gaza Strip. Over 1,000 aid seekers have been killed, often by Israel Defense Forces soldiers, at aid sites jointly administered by the U.S. and Israel.
"The First Amendment is supposed to be the cornerstone of American democracy—our shield against censorship and government overreach," said Abed Ayoub, ADC's national executive director. "When members of Congress and state lawmakers start compromising our freedoms to satisfy the demands of a foreign government, we lose what makes this country free. We must reject any legislation that threatens our speech, our conscience, and our right to dissent."
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Sanders Meets Freed Trump Political Prisoner Khalil as Columbia Punishes Gaza Protesters
"We must not allow Trump to destroy the First Amendment," Sanders said as the Ivy League school expelled or suspended scores of students in what critics called a bid to win back blocked federal funding.
Jul 22, 2025
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday met with Mahmoud Khalil—the former Columbia University Palestine defender recently imprisoned by the Trump administration—on the same day that the school expelled or suspended more than 70 students who protested Israel's genocidal obliteration of Gaza.
Sanders (I-Vt.) posted a photo of himself with his arm around a beaming Khalil, with the caption: "I met with Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, who was imprisoned for 104 days by the Trump administration for opposing [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's illegal and horrific war in Gaza. Outrageous. We must not allow [U.S. President Donald] Trump to destroy the First Amendment and freedom to dissent."
Khalil, an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent married to a U.S. citizen, last year finished his graduate studies at Columbia. He was arrested at his New York home by plainclothes Department of Homeland Security officers on March 8 before being transferred to New Jersey and then Louisiana, where he missed the birth of his first child.
Accused of no criminal offense and widely considered a political prisoner, Khalil was arrested following Trump's issuance of an executive order authorizing the deportation of noncitizen students and others who take part in pro-Palestine demonstrations. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also invoked the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952—which allows for the deportation of noncitizens whose presence in the United States is deemed detrimental to foreign policy interests—to target peaceful Palestine protesters who have committed no crimes.
Khalil was released last month upon a federal judge's order. He is far from the only student jailed for opposing the Gaza genocide; others include Mohsen Mahdawi and Yunseo Chung—both permanent U.S. residents—as well as Rümeysa Öztürk, Badar Khan Suri, and others.
On Tuesday, Columbia announced disciplinary action against more than 70 students who took part in last year's protests for Gaza at the New York City school's Butler Library. Around 80 Columbia students were arrested amid the violent police crackdown on campus encampments and occupations.
"While the university does not release individual disciplinary results of any student, the sanctions from Butler Library include probation, suspensions (ranging from one year to three years), degree revocations, and expulsions," Columbia's Office of Public Affairs said in a statement.
The school's announcement came days after Columbia and Trump administration officials met in Washington, D.C. to negotiate an agreement to restore most of the nearly $400 million in federal contracts for the university that were canceled in March over an alleged failure to tackle antisemitism.
As part of the deal, Columbia agreed to adopt the dubious International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism, which critics say conflates legitimate criticism and condemnation of Israeli policies and practices with anti-Jewish bigotry, and forces people to accept the legitimacy of a settler-colonial apartheid state engaged in illegal occupation and a war that experts increasingly agree is genocidal.
The school also said it would partner with the Anti-Defamation League on antisemitism training. Last year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the ADL for what it called a "pattern of enabling anti-Palestinian hate."
Columbia University interim president Claire Shipman has already been working with white nationalist Stephen Miller—Trump's White House deputy chief of staff and a primary architect of the president's first-term migrant family separation and Muslim travel ban policies—to restore lost contracts.
Columbia's acquiescence to the Trump administration comes as Israeli forces have killed or maimed more than 215,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, including at least 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Most of Gaza's more than 2 million people have been forcibly displaced, often multiple times, and hundreds of thousands of Gazans are starving amid an increasingly fatal famine fueled by Israel's siege of the enclave, which is partly the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case.
Israel has also been accused of committing scholasticide in Gaza, where every university has been destroyed or damaged.
"Hundreds of academics have been killed. Books and archives have been incinerated. Entire families have been erased from the civil registry," said one student quoted in a recent Columbia University Apartheid Divest blog post. "This is not a war. It is a campaign of erasure."
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Despite Board Capitulation, NEA Teachers Still Reject Anti-Defamation League
NEA's commitment to free speech may be tested should the ADL object to teachers introducing lessons on the history of Zionist erasure of Palestine.
Jul 20, 2025
In a gut punch to the base, National Education Association leaders lickety-split dismissed a motion passed by a majority of the NEA’s 7,000 delegates not to partner with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for curriculum or professional development.
In a possible violation of the union’s Standing Rules, evidence suggests the leadership failed to solicit written rebuttals and oral presentations from dissenting state and local affiliate presidents. Instead, the Board of Directors seemingly rubber-stamped the NEA Executive Committee recommendation to not implement New Business Motion (NBI) (39), passed by the Representative Assembly (RA) on July 5th in Portland, Oregon.
All it took were a few hundred emails from the Israel lobby and an announcement from ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt—the guy who compared a keffiyeh to a Swastika—that he personally spoke to union President Becky Pringle to urge abandonment of the motion.
On a Friday night, July 18, less than two weeks after the NEA Representative Assembly (RA) voted “not to use, endorse or publicize any materials from the Anti-Defamation League,” Pringle, president of the 3-million-member union, issued a statement.
“After consideration, it was determined that this proposal would not further NEA’s commitment to academic freedom, our membership, or our goals,” wrote Pringle, a former middle school science teacher who heads the largest teachers union–and the largest union– in the United States. “There is no doubt that antisemitism is on the rise. Without equivocation, NEA stands strongly against antisemitism.”
Ironically, it was a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, delegate Judy Greenspan of California, who introduced the ADL motion that emerged from the NEA Educators for Palestine Caucus.
In response to the NEA Board of Directors’ decision to nullify the RA vote, Greenspan said, “We are disappointed that the NEA not only violated a significant tenet of trade unionism by denying our democratically elected vote but also lost an opportunity to speak out against a harmful resource in our schools.”
Critics of the ADL point to its pro-Israel curriculum that links to handouts attacking Jewish Voice for Peace and the movement to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel for its occupation of Palestine.
“The ADL is not a neutral body. It is a bully pulpit that is used to disrupt, dox, and target supporters of Palestine, and opponents of racism, transphobia, and oppression,” said Greenspan. “ We will continue to speak out and rise up in NEA until justice is served.”
Quick to celebrate subversion of union democracy, the ADL, together with the Jewish Federations of North America, welcomed the NEA Executive Committee and Board of Directors' decision “to reject this misguided resolution that is rooted in exclusion and othering, and promoted for political reasons.”
Nora Lester Murad, a member of the founding team of the Drop the ADL from Schools campaign, said the NEA board made a mistake by caving to a bully. “If the NEA thinks that capitulating to the political demands of the ADL will protect its members from Israel lobby attacks, they are wrong. Educators and union members need the NEA, the largest union in the country, to speak the truth about political organizations masquerading as educational partners.”
Those who wonder whether the Board’s decision will backfire need only read the full ADL statement, which suggests there will be more demands coming down the pike. In a finger-waving scold, the ADL statement adds that the NEA “must redouble efforts to ensure that Jewish educators are not isolated and subjected to antisemitism in their unions and that students are not subjected to it in the classroom.”
The ADL’s definition of antisemitism as anti-Zionism, however, confuses the public and leads to inflated statistics, say critics. In 2024, Wikipedia editors agreed. They called the ADL an unreliable source on antisemitism and Israel/Palestine and told its contributors not to cite the ADL in articles on those topics.
In a Wikipedia discussion, a user named Loki, who has edited thousands of Wikipedia articles, said, “The ADL is heavily biased regarding Israel/Palestine to the point of often acting as a pro-Israel lobbying organization.” In fact, the ADL in 2024 spent nearly $1.5 million dollars on lobbying, pushing legislation to center criticism of Israel in examples of antisemitism.
The NEA Board decision to side with the ADL drew adjectives like “shameful” and "anti-democratic" on the union’s Instagram account, where a smattering of backers of the ADL fenced with a flood of infuriated union members. One commenter wrote, “If this is what democracy looks like within the NEA, then we’ll take a hard pass. The irony is that this is very Trump-like... ”
Also troubling to anti-genocide teachers is the NEA’s referral to the Executive Committee of a Jewish Affairs Caucus NBI (52) to “educate” members about the U.S. State Department’s definition of antisemitism. The State Department has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) examples, which conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Any attempt to “educate” members would chill the speech of teachers and students. Meanwhile, NBI (26) to adopt a “Screening Out Hate” checklist, also aligned to IHRA, was referred to the Executive Committee because like NBI (52) “it cannot be accomplished without further staff and resources.”
Despite President Pringle’s refusal to implement the motion to reject the ADL, she conceded in her statement that this decision is “in no way an endorsement of the ADL’s full body of work,” adding words of warning to the litigious lobby group. “We are calling on the ADL to support the free speech and association rights of all students and educators. We strongly condemn abhorrent and unacceptable attacks on our members who dedicate their lives to helping their students thrive. Our commitment to freedom of speech fully extends to freedom of protest and dissent whether in the public square or on college campuses.”
NEA’s commitment to free speech may be tested should the ADL object to teachers introducing lessons on the history of Zionist erasure of Palestine. NEA delegate Merrie Najimy, former President of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, points out that rank-and-file delegates also passed Amendment 5 to support the teaching of “accurate” Arab-American history. Scholars, such as authors Rashid Khalidi and Ilan Pappé, write Arab-American history encompasses the Nakba, the Arabic term for the “catastrophe” of 1948 when Zionist terrorist militias massacred Palestinian villages to impose a Jewish state.
Passage of an Arab-American history motion would have been unheard of several years ago, according to Najimy, a Lebanese-American who co-founded the NEA’s Educators for Palestine Caucus. In reflecting on the Board’s rejection of the ADL motion, a buoyant and ever-optimistic Najimy said, “What matters most is the passage of the motion in the first place because it represents a sea change in people’s understanding of who the Palestinians are and what their struggle is all about.”
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