Digital Library
Decoding Antisemitism An AI-driven Study on Hate Speech & Imagery Online Fifth Discourse Report
Topic:
Antisemitism & Antizionism, Israel & Regional Politics
Principal Investigators:
Dr. Matthias J. Becker (Principal), Prof. Helena Mihaljević (Co-Investigator)
Study Date:
2023
Source:
Alfred Landecker Foundation,Center for Research on Antisemitism,King's College London (KCL),Technische Universität Berlin
Key Findings:
This report investigates antisemitic web comments in the context of three international events: Kanye West’s antisemitic statements (focus on the UK and France), the antisemitic incidents occurred during the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar (UK), and to the Israeli legislative elections (Germany).
For years, the rapper Kanye West’s discourse has been studded with far-right and antisemitic statements. Since October 2022, his antisemitic position has become even more radical. The analysis shows that antisemitic reactions were more frequent in France (14%) than in the UK (11%), and that the percentages of antisemitic concepts vary according to the media outlet.
The analysis shows also that British and French users react in similar ways: they tend to either affirm, relativise, or deny West’s antisemitic statements. Likewise, they express ideas of jewish power and antisemitic conspiracy theories. In supporting the singer, web users rely increasingly on detour communication, or tend to reframe the debate either by claiming victimhood through alleged censorship or by outright denying the antisemitic nature of the incident.
During the 2022 FIFA World Cup, various antisemitic incidents took place, such as the heckling of Israeli journalists during interviews with football fans. In the UK, these events were largely discussed on Twitter. 10% of analysed comments contain antisemitic statements, and that users often evoke the following concepts: apartheid analogy, denial of the Jewish right to self-determination and evil.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory in 2022 Israeli elections caused a major international upheaval. This event was widely covered in Germany and triggered antisemitic reactions in the comments sections of the main German media websites as well as on their Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube profiles. 7% of analysed comments contain antisemitic comments. A wide range of antisemitic concepts such as Nazi or apartheid analogies, which fuel the idea of Israel as an evil state, were identified.
Finally, researchers from the field of Data Science at HTW Berlin examined existing approaches to automated detection of antisemitic posts. The existing web service Perspective API, which aims at detecting toxic language, was found to be biased towards specific keywords, and it could not easily detect disguised forms of antisemitism. Their approach, which uses transfer learning, is explained and their first results are presented. They also discuss the question of how the machine learning models, such as the one they work with, will be used.
Methodology:
Kanye West
Comment threads in the UK corpus were collected from the official social media accounts (mainly Facebook, with the exception of one Daily Mail Twitter thread) of ten major British mainstream media outlets reporting on West’s statements – BBC News, Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Independent, Metro, The Mirror, The Sun and The Times – as well as two non-political entertainment publications, OK! and Vice. Twenty threads posted between October and November 2022 were selected, and 100 comments from each were analysed (2,000 comments total).
The French corpus includes comment threads from the Facebook or Twitter profiles of ten media outlets, both political news media (Le Point, Le Monde, Le Figaro, Le Parisien, Le Nouvel Obs, BFMTV, LCI, Les Echos, TF1) and pop culture and tabloid media (QG, Les Inrockuptibles, French Rap US). 1,953 user comments were sampled, analysed, and grouped into four major clusters (1. West’s antisemitic remarks; 2. Reports on the public backlash and the splits between the rapper and his partner brands; 3. West’s subsequent escalation, in a series of statements in which he publicly supported Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime; 4. The artist’s belated apologies).
2022 FIFA World Cup
The ten threads selected for analysis came from a variety of well-followed accounts, including the ESPN.co.uk chief football writer Mark Ogden (268,000 followers), to Palestinian policy analyst Dr Yara Hawari (82,000 followers) and the American-Israeli philanthropist Adam Milstein (171,000 followers). The first 125 comments from each thread were coded, giving a total of 1,250 comments.
The Israeli elections in November 2022
Comment threads were collected from websites of the media outlets Zeit, Spiegel, ZDF, DW, Arte, Welt and Tagesschau and their pages on social media platforms Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The corpus comprises 19 threads and 2,111 annotated comments.