Google pulls Chrome extension that tracks Jewish people
Google has outlawed a third party extension to its popular Chrome web browser after discovering it was being used to pick out Jewish-sounding names on the internet who were subsequently targeted for anti-semitic abuse.
The ‘Coincidence Detector’ was developed by a far right group to highlight Jewish names with three sets of brackets and had accumulated some 2,500 users and a database of 8,000 common Jewish names before the plug in was pulled.
In that time a number of high profile Jewish people were targeted on social media for abuse, amongst them Jonathan Weisman, deputy Washington editor of the New York Times.
In response Weisman has adopted the brackets for his own Twitter handle to self-identify as Jewish as part of a campaign to combat the abuse by "showing strength and fearlessness".
Nobody's telling us to self-identify. We are showing strength and fearlessness. https://t.co/Xpgxtzer8k
— (((Jon Weisman))) (@jonathanweisman) 5 June 2016