Last week, the British musician Richard Cowie, Jr. (known by the stage name Wiley), declared on Twitter that Jews were “cowards” and “snakes,” and made all-too-familiar comments about Jews’ malign power. Twitter, after considerable outcry, removed the offending comments, and temporarily suspended Cowie’s account. But thousands of users of the platform—including the British chief rabbi and various figures from politics, journalism, and entertainment—were dissatisfied with its slow and tepid response, and are currently staging a 48-hour boycott of the website.

The episode raises the persistent problem of how to regulate social media, and the undeniable fact that social-media companies’ own censors rarely respond to anti-Semitic invective and incitement with the alacrity and firmness with which they respond to other forms of bigotry. Nitsana Darshan-Leitner comments:

Social-media platforms enjoy absolute immunity from any liability over the user-generated content they feature. [Instead, they] have an internal mechanism for dealing with “content that violates the community’s rules,” and remove posts according to their sole discretion. The broad immunity afforded to them by law often translates into selective enforcement.

There have been dozens of cases in which right-wing activists and journalists had their Facebook accounts suspended for allegedly violating the community’s rules with their posts, all while someone sitting in Facebook headquarters in Ireland has no problem allowing posts inciting the murder of Jews to stand.

Facebook’s own interpretation of the limits of freedom of expression has had a clear impact on the waves of stabbing and ramming attacks in Israel and around the world. This has been clearly shown in examples of inciting social-media posts included as evidence of motive and intent in many cases of mayhem and murder. The evidence proves that the killers were often inspired by, and drew ideological justification for, their actions from posts by extremist religious leaders. It also proves that they received “training” from videos posted by terrorist groups on their websites as well as on social media.

For years, social-media giants have refused to abide by any regulation or to cooperate with state authorities because they had no intention of sharing the immense power they have amassed in terms of navigating global discourse. That is not only senseless, it violates U.S. laws that bar aiding and abetting any form of terrorism.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.