Proof That Antisemitism Is Up on Twitter and Other Social Media Platforms

Key Findings:

With the uptick in time spent online during the COVID-19 pandemic, antisemitic activity across online platforms has greatly increased. The prime concern regarding antisemitism on social media is that it has proven to lead to radicalization, and harbors the potential to transform to physical threat. The ability to properly monitor antisemitic web activity more accurately is a major challenge and undertaking in contemporary antisemitism research today. 

Jikeli, a professor from Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, maintains that an exact figure for the amount of antisemitic posts online each day still remains unknown, but can likely reach the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. 

Twitter, for example, reported around 4,000 antisemitic tweets per day in 2020. This number reflects only on tweets posted in English, and that explicitly mention the word “Jews”. 

The author presents a graph that illustrates how antisemitic activity has increased on Twitter beginning in 2020. The peak number was reached during the Hamas-Israel war in May 2021. 

Automated classification of antisemitic content has made large advancements recently, however it is still difficult to achieve complete accuracy. This is due to the limited existence of datasets that are able to accurately detect wide variations of content, as well as limitations presented due to the sheer volume of data available. The author states that automatic detection can also yield false positives, and references a test using ChatGPT, an AI platform. 

Current projects regarding advancing automated detection are focusing on radicalization, and have found that it is most likely to occur on fringe platforms when opposing viewpoints are not present to denormalize the antisemitic speech. These radicalized online environments are likely to embolden antisemitic individuals to cause physical threat to Jewish people. Thus, the study of online trends and the emphasis on expanding its capabilities for detection accuracy is crucial.