Facebook has blocked the automatic chatbot on Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s website. An entry on the Facebook page itself has also been deleted according to consistent reports from the Israeli media. The company is responding to a post by Netanyahu in which he promoted the Israeli vaccination program.
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Netanyahu had advertised in a video published on Facebook and Twitter to get vaccinated against the corona virus. He had also asked his viewers to send him the phone numbers of friends who were still unsure or undecided. Specifically, Netanyahu said, “If you know someone who is nervous about the vaccinations, send me their name and phone number. Maybe then they’ll get a surprise call from me and I’ll convince them. “
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In addition to the Facebook entry, the same message was spread in the chatbot on Netanyahu’s Facebook page. Users can usually interact with the bot independently. It sends out Netanyahu’s automatic responses to predefined questions.
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Removed the “offensive entry”
This type of disclosure of medical data does not comply with Facebook guidelines, said a spokeswoman for the group. Sharing or asking for health information is prohibited. “We removed the offensive entry and temporarily suspended the messenger bot that also distributed the content.”
The Israeli communication scientist Anat Ben-David had drawn attention to the bot entry. It was therefore not the first time that Netanyahu’s chatbot was programmed to query data.
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In September 2019, Facebook had already blocked Netanyahu’s page on election day after it had published interim results from election polls. That is forbidden in Israel during election day.
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A spokesman for Netanyahu’s Likud party said, according to data from »Times of Israel«The idea of the vaccination message was simply “to encourage Israelis who are over 60 to get vaccinated in order to save lives”. The video is still available on Twitter.
Pioneer in vaccination
Israel runs one of the world’s most successful vaccination campaigns in the fight against Covid-19. More than a million people have received the two necessary vaccinations against the coronavirus. So far, around 2.6 million people have received the first dose.
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Just over nine million people live in Israel. Germany has around nine times as many inhabitants. So far, almost 230,000 people in this country have been vaccinated twice against the coronavirus. According to the Pfizer company, vaccination protection is 95 percent one week after the second vaccination.
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