The Israeli government is likely to pass a bill which seeks to force Facebook and other social media platforms to do away with content the government views as incitement, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

According to the article, in the backdrop of free-speech concerns, Israel's Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said, “Israel is fighting and will continue to fight terrorism, also on the Internet.”

The bill — currently pending final approval — has been sent by a parliamentary committee to all the members for a final vote, the results of which are expected later this week.

Bloomberg reports that the bill has been in the making since 2016 when Shaked and Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan started work on it.

Requests made by the Israeli government to remove troublesome material, went up from 95 a month in January 2017 to 2,420 in December that year when Trump announced the decision to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

A spokesperson for Shaked told Bloomberg that Facebook has agreed to nearly all the requests.

The bill will enable the government to respond promptly — in accordance with recommendations provided by the police and attorney general — “to remove content liable to lead to acts of terror and murder,” Erdan said in a statement.

He said that Palestinians arrested in the past have admitted to being swayed by content on Facebook, Twitter Inc., YouTube Inc. and other online platforms.

Bloomberg says that neither Facebook representatives nor spokespersons for Twitter or Google were available for comment on the bill.

Expanded scope

Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, head of the Israel Democracy Institute’s Center for Democratic Values and Institutions, has expressed reservations regarding the bill's scope saying that it was worrisome that it had been expanded to cover everything in the national penal code.

“The heart of the problem here is that you don’t have to look for the person, bring him in, or press criminal charges. You just remove the content in an administrative way,” she said. “I’m afraid other countries are looking at Israel — at the frontier of fighting terror and at the same time Start-Up Nation — for how to solve problems on social media. I don’t want this to be the example.”

According to the contents of a report written by Altshuler: "the bill would allow the government to ask courts for an order removing content within 48 hours. No other country has provisions as broad as the proposed Israeli law, and none allows the state to ask the courts to rule on an order to remove content without needing to present evidence," the article states.