By STEVEN ERLANGER and ALAN COWELL
Published: October 19, 2012

The anti semitism posts had produced increasing criticism and outrage over the last week from the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France and from SOS Racisme, a lobbying group that denounced a “wave of feverish hatred.” Some of the posts had been removed as of Friday evening.

The anti-Semitic posts sometimes included photos from the Holocaust and a variety of jokes. There were also anti-Muslim posts. The student union had threatened to get an injunction under French law, which prohibits discrimination based on religion, ethnicity or race, one of its lawyers, Stéphane Lilti, told French news agencies.

Several Twitter users posting under the hashtag criticized the decision to delete the anti-Semitic posts, calling it censorship. A user calling himself Andre said: “Better to educate than censure. Shame on you Twitter.” Another, Craig McLeod, asked, “Who decides what is anti-Semitic and abusive?”

Asked for comment, Twitter repeated its standard policy statement: “Twitter does not mediate content. If we are alerted to content that may be in violation of our terms of service, we will investigate each report and respond according to the policies and procedures outlined in our support pages.”

No one at Twitter would talk on the record about the French posts, but it has its own criteria for regulating content and will sometimes suspend an individual account or withhold individual posts.

“We salute the decision of Twitter to respond to our request and promptly remove racist and anti-Semitic tweets,” said the president of the student union, Jonathan Hayoun. He said the union still intended to file a complaint against the company, which has refused to identify the people behind the posts.

Article taken from anytime.com