LinkedIn Battles Site That Shames Users Who Criticize Israel

LinkedIn has threatened legal action against a website that compiled thousands of posts and user profiles from the online job platform and claimed they were evidence of anti-Israeli and pro-Hamas sentiment.

Since the war between Israel and Hamas began on Oct. 7, the site, anti-israel-employees.co.il, hoovered up posts from across social media — some 22,000 total — and identified 12,500 employees at major companies like Amazon, Master and Ernest & Young, according to The New York Times.

When LinkedIn sent the site's organizers a cease-and-desist letter, they switched the site's domain from ".com" to an Israel-specific one, hoping the move can offer them legal cover.

Anti-Israel Employees' mission is to "expose people who supported Hamas publicly," Itai Liptz, a hedge fund manager who is one of the site's cofounders told the Times. "We wanted to have it documented and a record."

But Anti-Israel Employees also included posts that were not clearly pro-Hamas and others that drew attention the well-documented humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza. At least some of the posts were submitted by the site's visitors, and the site was popularized through WhatsApp groups.

LinkedIn suspected that Anti-Israel Employees had deployed automated programs to harvest the content, a practice known as scraping that the site denies using.

Liptz acknowledge the site had a mistake with its far-reaching catalog. "If somebody says 'Free Palestine' that is totally OK," he said.

Social media has rapidly became another front in the conflict between Israel and Hamas. It has become a hot bed of misinformation around what's happening in the Middle East — and also a battleground between Palestinian and Israeli supporters around the world. In one prominent incident at Harvard University, students who signed a letter describing Israel as "entirely responsible" for Hamas' initial invasion of Israel had their identities posted online after the letter went viral.