Between 2019 and 2020, more than two million Twitter posts regarding Jews or Israel were anti-Semitic, according to a study from the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) at Indiana University.
In 2019,
849,253 tweets—6.9 percent of all conversations about Jews on Twitter—were
anti-Semitic. That proportion rose in 2020 to 10.7 percent, meaning 1,531,912
anti-Semitic tweets were posted, 4,197 per day or one every 20 seconds, in
conversations that include the word “Jews.”
ISCA said
the content was mostly related to conspiracy theories about Jewish world
domination, the Middle East conflict and the Holocaust
“We need
to do more research to identify the sources of anti-Semitic propaganda. Some of
it comes from neo-Nazi groups, anti-Zionist organizations and Iranian-sponsored
activities,” the institute said.
Denying
the Jewish people a right to self-determination was also a common theme found
by ISCA in anti-Semitic Twitter conversations about Jews and Israel. The words
“Palestinian” and “apartheid” were often in the Twitter conversations.
ISCA said
instances of such content increased from 2019 to 2020 “despite claims from
Twitter that they were cracking down on anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.”
“Social
media has become the largest medium for anti-Semitic narratives, which can
radicalize individuals and lead to violence, and push Jews out of these
spaces,” the researchers explained in the report. “We plan to continue
increasing the size of the dataset and the variety of content within it so that
it can serve as a gold standard for automated detection of anti-Semitic tweets
… The results contribute to our understanding of online hate speech against
Jews.”
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