{"id":87898,"date":"2021-07-20T17:05:37","date_gmt":"2021-07-20T15:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=87898"},"modified":"2021-07-20T07:39:58","modified_gmt":"2021-07-20T05:39:58","slug":"30-00-56","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=87898","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Hate Is More Engaging\u2019: Researchers Make Headway Measuring Antisemitic Propaganda on Social Media"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>\u2018Hate Is More Engaging\u2019: Researchers Make Headway Measuring Antisemitic Propaganda on Social Media<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Ben Cohen<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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A pandemic-themed adaptation of the antisemitic, so-called \u201chappy merchant\u201d meme. Photo: ADL<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The year-long lockdown brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 cemented the place of social media as the main channel for the spread of antisemitic messages, often of the crudest and most violent kind.<\/span><\/p>\n

As the virus enveloped the world, a set of coronavirus-related antisemitic memes rapidly took shape. Some online trolls asserted that, just like the Black Death in the 14th Century, COVID-19 was a Jewish creation, while others urged that the disease \u2014 dubbed the \u201cHolocough\u201d \u2014 be used to kill Jews en masse.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another innovation during this period was the phenomenon of \u201cZoom bombing.\u201d As social distancing measures compelled Jewish institutions to move real-world events onto online platforms like Zoom, dozens of virtual meetings were hijacked by antisemitic rabble-rousers, pushing what one German research institute described as an \u201coverlap of<\/a><\/strong><\/span> Nazi-glorifying and anti-Israel content\u201d to a bewildered and often distressed audience.<\/span><\/p>\n

In tandem with those outrages, established social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter were flooded with antisemitic posts. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), between May 7 and May 14 alone this year, more than 17,000 posts on Twitter used some variation of the phrase \u201cHitler was right.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Quantifying these antisemitic conversations on social media and distilling their content has become a key task for academic researchers monitoring the spread of antisemitism through a range of social and professional networks. At Indiana University, Bloomington, scholars at the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) \u2014 which today launched a major conference on antisemitism in the US<\/a>,<\/strong> <\/span>to continue through next week \u2014 are working with colleagues from other departments such as computer science to sift through thousands of antisemitic tweets, some of which are written in strongly coded language, and with others expressing their hatred of Jews in candid terms.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIndiana University has an agreement with Twitter to obtain 10 percent of all tweets on a statistically-relevant basis,\u201d Prof. Gunther Jikeli of ISCA explained in an extensive interview with The Algemeiner<\/em>. \u201cThat represents a huge database that we can run queries on.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Jikeli said that he has been meeting on a twice-weekly basis with a research team that includes historians and linguists as well as computer programmers. Various generic search terms are utilized, such as \u201cIsrael,\u201d Jews\u201d and \u201cZionism,\u201d as well as pejoratives like \u201czionazi\u201d and \u201ck*ke.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we monitor individual tweets, we get the text of the post, the user ID, the number of retweets and responses, and other kinds of metadata that allow us to see the extent of its footprint,\u201d Jikeli said. \u201cWe then apply a number of considerations to determine whether the posting is antisemitic.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Those considerations are based upon the working definition of antisemitism<\/a><\/strong><\/span> endorsed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which demonstrates how antisemitic narratives work and how they can manifest in different contexts. Indiana University\u2019s ISCA researchers analyzing Twitter posts are directed to an annotation portal, where they can add additional details and perspectives. A series of prompts \u2014 does the tweet quality as antisemitic under the IHRA definition? How intensely is the antisemitism expressed? Is the Holocaust mentioned? Is the user intending to be sarcastic? \u2014 can then be answered in order to accurately categorize the post.<\/span><\/p>\n

Delivering his paper to the ISCA conference on Monday, Jikeli said that his research attempted to clarify six basic questions: what does antisemitism on social media look like? How widespread is it? Who is pushing these messages? Who is countering them? What is the overall impact? And what can be done to combat it?<\/span><\/p>\n

On the last question, the issue of censorship, or \u201cdeplatforming,\u201d crops up constantly. Between a climate of absolute censorship of postings deemed antisemitic or racist and an open season for bigotry online, Jikeli is trying to find a more nuanced solution.<\/span><\/p>\n

Banning antisemites from social media raises both ethical questions about freedom of expression and practical questions about how to close down millions of social media accounts that traffic in bigotry. Jikeli cited recent research from the University of Amsterdam showing that antisemitic accounts removed from mainstream platforms tend to reappear in fringe locations \u2014 among others 4chan, Telegram and Gab, the latter application used by Pittsburgh Synagogue shooter Robert Bowers in 2018. Encouragingly, however, these restored accounts invariably have far fewer followers on these lesser platforms, and therefore find it harder to engage in what Jikeli called the \u201cmonetization of hatred.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet while antisemites are turning to less popular platforms (as well as the dark web) as service providers clamp down on hate speech, the profile of antisemitism on mainstream social media still continues to rise. Studies of TikTok and Twitter in the last year showed that despite the commitment of the platforms to enforce community speech guidelines, antisemitic tweets increased exponentially on both.<\/span><\/p>\n

Paradoxically, some extremist leaders are eager to avoid incitement on their own platforms for two main reasons: showing more moderate potential supporters that they eschew violence, and avoiding being shut down by the service providers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ayal Feinberg, an assistant professor of political science at Texas A&M University who moderated Jikeli\u2019s panel on Monday, quoted the observation of one leading neo-Nazi in this regard. \u201cThese Jewish corpses are going to be used as clubs in the years to come to beat down our free speech rights,\u201d moaned Andrew Anglin \u2014 publisher of the viciously racist Daily Stormer<\/em> website \u2014 in the wake of the massacre at Pittsburgh\u2019s Tree of Life synagogue.<\/span><\/p>\n

On both sides of this clash, however, uncertainty prevails over what steps social media companies will take in future. While extremists fear the imposition of speech guidelines, Jikeli and others point out that equally, social media companies have a financial interest in directing users to content that they will engage with for a longer period of time.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHate content is more engaging, and that\u2019s why the social media companies don\u2019t want a reduction from this point of view, they want more of the same,\u201d Jikeli observed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jikeli emphasized that even when it is not fed directly to users, \u201cantisemitic content is easy to find on the internet\u201d \u2014 a state of affairs that is unlikely to be resolved overnight.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThese social media companies are very young, and our research is also in its infancy,\u201d Jikeli noted. \u201cWe are only at the beginning of our work.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2018Hate Is More Engaging\u2019: Researchers Make Headway Measuring Antisemitic Propaganda on Social Media Ben Cohen A pandemic-themed adaptation of the antisemitic, so-called \u201chappy merchant\u201d meme. Photo: ADL The year-long lockdown brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 cemented the place of social media as the main channel for the spread of antisemitic messages, often […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87898"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87898"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87909,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87898\/revisions\/87909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}