The France 3 national broadcaster revealed on Wednesday why it was forced to cut a live Facebook feed of President Emmanuel Macron's Tuesday visit to a Jewish cemetery which had been desecrated and vandalised by swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans.
"We're talking about explicit death threats," and comments "including 'Heil Hitler', 'dirty Jew' or 'dirty Jews'," France 3 clarified, noting the feed was inundated with the "vile" comments "within minutes," exceeding the network's ability to moderate them.
"We refuse to traffic in hatred," the channel noted, while emphasising that the comments were those of a "minority of internet users."
People across France took to the streets on Tuesday under the motto "No to Anti-Semitism" amid the growing number of attacks against the Jewish minority. The string of marches included a rally by some 20,000 people in the centre of Paris.
Home to an estimated 500,000 Jews, France has the world's third-largest Jewish community. Unfortunately, recently published French Interior Ministry statistics found that some 541 attacks believed to be based on anti-Semitic grounds took place in 2018, up a whopping 74 per cent compared to 311 similar attacks registered in 2017.
President Macron, for his part, promised to "take action…pass laws, and…impose punishments" against the perpetrators of the cemetery attack, saying that those responsible were "not worthy of the Republic."
