Two separate studies found a notable increase in anti-Semitic images and other posts on Twitter and Instagram over the past year, despite content policies on both platforms supposedly banning hateful content against minority groups.
A study released Friday by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization that tracks anti-Jewish sentiment, reported the existence of “online propaganda offensives” containing anti-Semitic content designed to intimidate Jewish people and Jewish journalists ahead of the 2018 midterms.
The study also names social media platforms such as Twitter as “key facilitators” of “anti-Semitic harassment.”
“The themes of this online harassment against the Jewish American community, especially against journalists and prominent members of this group, have been carried from the 2016 presidential election to the 2018 midterm content,” ADL fellow and Harvard scholar Samuel Woodley wrote in the study.
Nearly 30 percent of the more than 7.5 million tweets analyzed were revealed to be from “bots,” or automated accounts, designed to push anti-Semitic content which researchers agreed was “worse on Twitter than on Facebook,” according to the ADL.
“Online hate is not some idle threat that just lives online and can be ignored. Technology companies need to work harder and faster to curb the vicious violence-inducing harassment on their platforms,” the ADL’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a news release.
A separate study from Columbia University professor Jonathan Albright found Instagram searches for “George Soros,” a Jewish American billionaire Democratic mega-donor turned up impostor accounts often containing anti-Semitic smears of the businessman, according to NBC News. Similar images and posts could be found by searching “#Soros” on the platform.
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Instagram and Twitter seeing a rise in attacks on Jewish people https://t.co/fPzU5kpL9Q pic.twitter.com/tCGqWPYINn
— The Hill (@thehill) October 27, 2018
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