PARIS — Twitter has given French authorities information that can help identify the authors of a series of racist and anti-Semitic tweets that carried French hashtags, and the social media site also has agreed to work with a Jewish student group that sued for the data on other ways to fight hate speech.
The president of the Union of Jewish Students of France said Saturday that his organization, known as UEJF, was withdrawing a $50 million lawsuit against San Francisco-based Twitter Inc., which was originally filed as a means to pressure the company to comply and “end Twitter’s indifference.”
“We got Twitter to respect the laws of our country,” Jonathan Hayoun said in an interview. Propagating racial and anti-Semitic hatred is against French law.
In January, a Paris court ordered Twitter to turn over data that could help identify account holders who last fall posted the offending tweets, which included slurs and photos evoking the Holocaust. The anti-Semitic tweets, which started Oct. 10, were followed by racist posts against Muslims. Twitter then agreed to pull the tweets.
A joint statement Friday from Twitter and the UEJF said the social media site has turned over to the Paris prosecutor’s press and public liberties section “data that may enable the identification of certain users that the vice-prosecutor believes have violated French law.”
The statement also said the two sides agreed to “continue contributing together to the fight against racism and anti-Semitism, in keeping with their respective domestic laws and regulations.”
