New York – As The Economy Turned Sour, Anti-Semitism Increasingly Prevalent

New York – While the subprime mortgage crisis roils the market, a profusion of anti-Semitic rhetoric has exploded against companies like Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers Holdings on online message boards maintained by Yahoo.

The Jews at Goldman are responsible for high oil prices,” one user on a Yahoo message board for Goldman Sachs wrote recently. “Yeah, not one word from the media about how the greedy Jews have brought this whole financial mess on the world. Wonder why that is?” said another poster on a message board for Lehman Brothers Holdings.

These comments and others like them have drawn the attention of the Anti-Defamation League and public relations officers from firms named on the message boards, who are approaching Yahoo about cleaning up the sites.

“We don’t have any affiliation with the site,” a spokeswoman at Goldman Sachs, Andrea Raphael, said, adding that the firm has contacted Yahoo and asked that it remove the offensive comments from the boards.

The Anti-Defamation League is also jumping into the fray, and has contacted Yahoo to look into the matter. “We are hopeful that when we get in touch with them, they will address the problem,” the associate director of civil rights, Steven Freeman, said.

On the site, banks that are attacked also include Washington Mutual, with comments like, “No wonder the Germans hate Jews so much. Just for making a dime, they are willing to destroy and ruin the country which gives them shelter,” according to someone called sunfy8.

A commenter calling himself hochithul said on a site for Goldman Sachs, “Jew banks will get destroyed by shorts,” referring to short sellers. “Jews stick together like mud and love to pat themselves on the back,” prudentman007 wrote on the same site. Lehman Brothers is also under attack, with someone named dontputsaltonmypepper noting, “Them Jews are sneaky bastards.”

Yahoo “takes abusive language on its message boards very seriously,” the company said in a statement. The terms of service for using its message board disallows any comments that are “defamatory, vulgar, obscene” or “hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable,” but it also has a liability clause that releases Yahoo from any responsibility for these third-party comments.

The vitriolic comments were first unearthed by the Web log Self-Evident after searching for terms “Jew” or “Jews” on message boards for financial companies.

The commentators don’t limit their comments to the defamation of Jews, also employing epithets for homosexuals and African Americans, although less frequently.

Yahoo’s message boards, which link to individual company pages that track company performance, news items, and stock prices, seem particularly susceptible to this kind of conduct. A search of similar pages supported by Google returned almost no examples of anti-Semitic statements.

There are two ways in which message board posts are monitored: there are filters that weed out offensive language, and there is a customer care team that employs “swift and immediate action in response to user reports of abuse,” according to Yahoo. The company claims that a response to a complaint usually takes place within 24 hours, with the customer care team either deleting the post or revoking an offender’s user account.

It can be hard to determine the liability of companies when they are used as a platform for vitriol, a senior fellow in regulatory policies at the Heritage Foundation, James Gattuso, said. If an anonymous commenter disseminates troubling content, Yahoo is not responsible, but if Yahoo hosts a discussion group that it is monitoring and there is hateful content, it could be held liable. “Things like these are not as new as we think. If someone says something defamatory on NBC, is the television channel responsible?” he said.

According to the Communication Decency Act of 1996, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Since users are considered information content providers, Yahoo is not liable for defamatory statements made by them, a spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Rebecca Jeschke, said.

“The principle is that you hold the speaker liable, and not the soapbox.”