A/HRC/48/77 and had been involved in large-scale human rights violations against Iraqis in general and against specific ethnic and religious groups. The acts included killings, torture, kidnapping, rape, sexual slavery, forced religious conversion and child recruitment, amounting to violations of international humanitarian law; some of the acts might amount to crimes against humanity. 47. The Government referred to legal measures to counter extremist political parties and movements, in particular Law No. 32 of 2016, prohibiting entities or political parties that adopted, incited or promoted ideologies of racism, terrorism, takfir or ethnic cleansing. The Law on Political Parties (No. 36 of 2015) prohibited the creation of political parties based on racist grounds, terrorism, takfir, or ethnic, sectarian or national extremism. The Government further highlighted that Iraq spared no efforts to ensure respect for and protection of religious symbols, shrines and buildings. The telecommunications authority had issued several guidelines, including on the prohibition of incitement to violence and hatred. Israel 48. The Government of Israel stated that, historically, times of crisis had created fertile ground for extremism and radicalization. The COVID-19 outbreak was no exception and had been used to disseminate racism, xenophobia and antisemitism. Both quantitative and qualitative data analysis indicated that extremist groups across the ideological spectrum were capitalizing on the uncertainty created by the pandemic to scapegoat specific groups. Rampant spread of fake news, misinformation and hate speech surrounding the novel coronavirus constituted unequivocal demonstration of the imperative need to confront online hate speech. 49. In a politically and socially polarized era, the COVID-19 pandemic had amplified already existing tensions and divisions within societies. Although it was still early to assess the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak on radicalization and antisemitism, the great economic depression the world was facing could lead to a significant surge in general criminality and hate crime. 50. Regarding hate speech, the growing awareness of the major role of the Internet and social media in the proliferation of all forms of hatred – including as vectors and amplifiers of radicalization – had prompted governments and civil society actors to commit to building a safer Internet, including through measures to encourage collaborative work with technology giants, initiate legislation and impose heavy sanctions. However, the regulation of the virtual space remained an enormous transnational challenge requiring greater international cooperation; such cooperation could prove fundamental for providing an effective strategy. 51. Despite overall positive trends in hate speech regulation on mainstream social media platforms, there was still considerable room for improvement. Efforts to tackle online hate speech had resulted in the migration of many extremists to alternative social media platforms. That phenomenon demonstrated the imperative need to adapt policies, regulations and legislation to that alternative environment. Although social media sites could and should do significantly more to address the dissemination of prohibited hateful content, mainstream platforms seemed to have managed to expel a considerable proportion of their most openly extremist users. That encouraging data should be interpreted cautiously, as a large amount of hate speech remained online. 52. The alternative social media platforms had become a haven for white nationalists and neo-Nazis. The Antisemitism Cyber Monitoring System, a real-time monitoring system based on artificial intelligence and semantic analysis technologies, showed that the proportion of content glorifying Nazi ideology, denying or distorting the Holocaust, and calling for violence against Jews seemed significantly higher within alternative social media environments than on mainstream platforms. 53. On February 2021, the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which were in charge of combating antisemitism and the delegitimization of Israel, proposed policy to incorporate a coordinated government approach to combating antisemitic hate speech online. The draft proposal was still under discussion. 9