Metadata

• When: 2024-03-02

• Where: Columbia University

• Who: Layla Saliba

• Organizations:

• Tags:

Description

On or around March 2, 2024 at 11:57pm the DJHC archive document (this document) was restricted by Google for violating its Spam Policy.

The restriction means that the document is not viewable by anyone other than the Google account that created the document. The document is restricted when multiple people complain that it is SPAM. The Google Spam Policy states, “Do not spam. This may include unwanted promotional or commercial content, unwanted content that is created by an automated program, unwanted repetitive content, nonsensical content, or anything that appears to be a mass solicitation.” None of these apply to the DJHC archive document.

Further investigation revealed that earlier that day an anti-Israel activist [archive], who is a graduate student at Barnard College, posted multiple public tweets (post1 [archive], post2 [archive]) about the DJHC archive document online. It should be noted that this activist is promoting [archive] her own initiative to collect data, doxx people and leak information. According to X/Twitter metrics, this activist’s tweets have been seen by thousands of people, liked and retweeted by hundreds of people.

It is our conjecture that the most likely scenario is that hundreds of anti-Israel online activists (or bots) who saw tweets about a document they disliked created a flood of malicious SPAM complaints causing Google’s algorithms to restrict the document.

Restoring the document and hardening its hosting took a significant amount of effort. This should be considered a cyberattack by people who do not want to see antisemitic and anti-Israel activities at Columbia documented.

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