Lizzy Savetsky confronts executive over Meta’s Jew hate

An American influencer who receives regular death threats challenged a Meta executive at a gathering in Poland on Monday over the company’s handling of antisemitic harassment, prompting a discussion of AI tools to counter Jew-hatred online.

Lizzy Savetsky, a New York-based content creator with hundreds of thousands of followers on Meta-owned Instagram, interrupted Edo Haveman, the company’s director of public policy for the Benelux region, as he described the firm’s policies against hateful content.

“I just filed a harassment report five minutes ago,” she told him.

Haveman said he hoped her complaint would be addressed promptly, and acknowledged Meta’s moderation systems weren’t always effective.

The exchange took place during a panel discussion organized by the European Jewish Association on the anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom, ahead of a delegation visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau former German death camp. Haveman and Jeff Bullwinkel, Microsoft’s vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, both attended the event and are scheduled to visit Auschwitz with the delegation.

On Kristallnacht, Nov. 9–10, 1938, Nazis and their supporters burned hundreds of synagogues across Germany and Austria. The event is widely viewed as the opening shot in the campaign of violence against European Jews that culminated in the Holocaust.

Savetsky, who is Jewish, said she has received death threats since she began publicly supporting Israel in 2021.

“I’m pretty disappointed, I have to say, in the policing of the hate and the threats [online],” she said, adding that she reports threats to the New York Police Department and has been in contact with the FBI.

A World Jewish Congress study published earlier this year found that reporting content to platforms had little effect on whether it was removed. Of 754 antisemitic social media posts reported by Jewish community members across Europe between February 2025 and April 2026, 613 — about 81 percent — were still online when researchers checked them in May.

A separate report published this year by the group StopAntisemitism found that TikTok removed antisemitic content at a higher rate than Instagram. TikTok removed nearly half of about 50 reported accounts and took action against 48 percent of 324 flagged posts, while Meta removed 33 percent of 36 reported Instagram accounts and took action against 40 percent of 175 flagged posts.

The volume of antisemitic content online jumped after the Hamas-led massacres in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and has not returned to pre-Oct. 7 levels, the Online Hate Prevention Institute said in an overview last year based on almost 10,000 items of antisemitic content.

Haveman said Meta was preparing to use large language models to speed the identification and removal of hateful content from Facebook and Instagram. “AI and specifically LLMs are gonna help us a lot to act even quicker,” he said.

He also expressed willingness to explore a mechanism through which Jewish organizations and prominent Jewish social media personalities could escalate serious complaints.

Bullwinkel outlined Microsoft’s Azure AI Content Safety system, launched in 2023, which allows organizations to configure filters against harmful content. He invited the European Jewish Association to take part in an upcoming roundtable in Israel on combating AI-generated hatred and using artificial intelligence to preserve Holocaust memory. —JNS