A public-benefit initiative in formation

What this is, and who is building it

Civic Shield is built as European democratic-resilience infrastructure. Antisemitism is the material it documents, and the thing that material damages is broader than any one community: it is the trust a democratic society needs in order to function, and the ability of its institutions to be held to their own rules. Evidence that survives examination is what makes both of those defensible. That is the work.

It is founded by a Jewish team, and there is no reason to be circumspect about it. People build institutions against the harm they can see clearly. What matters for anyone assessing this organisation is not who founded it but whether its method holds, whether its limits are real, and whether its output would stand up in front of a regulator, a court or a journalist. Those are the questions this site is written to be judged on.

Civic Shield is being designed as a public-benefit institution rather than an advocacy project. It documents content, not people; it publishes its method before its findings; and it is meant to be usable by anyone in Europe who has a lawful reason to act on what it records.

Where the organisation actually is

“In formation” is a precise term here and it is worth spelling out, because it is the fact that most changes how everything else on this site should be read.

• No legal entity is registered. There is no company, no association and no foundation. Nothing on this site should be read as a claim of established status.
• No public-benefit tax status exists, in Germany or anywhere else. No donation to Civic Shield is tax-deductible, because there is nothing to deduct it against.
• No pilot has run, no monitoring is operating, and no case file exists.
• No organisation has agreed to work with us. Every institution named in our materials is one we intend to approach.
• No money has been accepted, and none can properly be accepted until there is an entity to receive, account for and report on it.

The intention is a German or European public-benefit entity, chosen because the subject matter, the regulatory framework and the institutional funders all sit there. The roadmap states what has to happen first, in order.

Why a non-profit, and not a vendor

The same system could be built as a commercial trust-and-safety product and sold to platforms. That version would work, and it would be worth less.

An organisation whose income depends on the entities it documents cannot credibly publish findings about them, and an evidence system that cannot publish is a compliance service. A public-benefit body can hold three commitments that a vendor structurally cannot: it can publish its error rates, it can refuse work that conflicts with its stated limits, and it can be governed by people who do not report to its customers.

The trade is real. It means slower money, a longer path to operating, and a governance burden that a company would not carry. It also means the output is worth something to a regulator, a court or a journalist, which a vendor’s output would not be.