Two days after Facebook raised $106 billion in its very big deal IPO, 40,000 people will gather at CitiField and nearby Arthur Ashe Stadium to protest it, its social media peers, and the Internet in general. Also: porn. It’s not Luddites or wrathful former MySpace employees — the sold-out stadium will be full of mostly ultra-Orthodox Jews that view the internet as a threat to rabbinic power, at a time when some people would prefer to lose a hand rather than lose their Internet connection. And then there’s all the porn, which is also very bad (cue the ridicule). As Tablet explains:An organization called Ichud HaKehillos LeTohar HaMachane (Union of Communities for the Purity of the Camp) raised $1.5 million for the massive asifa (rally) protesting the "evils of the Internet and the damages caused by advanced electronic devices." It is a watershed event, marking the arrival of online censorship as a primary—and public—focus in the ultra-Orthodox community. The rally is not, as some have joked, merely about pornography: Rabbi Moshe Drew, who operated the Ichud HaKehillos technology-awareness hotline, identified "Facebook and social networking sites" as the most damaging material online, while others see the Internet as an issue of politics as much as piety. "By having a following that will make no decisions on their own, the ruler sets the tone," wrote Michael J. Salamon in the Times of Israel, stressing that Internet access—and everything that comes with it—threatens basic rabbinic authority. And then, of course, it is also about porn.Honestly, I don’t know enough about ultra-Orthodox Judaism to say anything especially smart here. But I do wonder about the kind of massive phone tree it must have taken to round up 40,000 people.That is, 40,000 men. Women are not allowed because according to the organizers, creating separate sections for women, per religious custom, would have been a logistical nightmare.Update: a schedule for tonight’s rally can be found here. In addition to the presence of the Department of Environmental Protection, which “will assist in monitoring the air quality throughout the event,” the organizers are working with almost every single city agency to coordinate the security detail and cope with counter protests, including one called The Internet Is Not the Problem, which will bring attention to charges of child sexual abuse within the Orthodox community.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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