Online Antisemitism After 7 October 2023

Antisemitism surged following the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023. Antisemitism on social media incited offline incidents including hate crimes, reflected the hostile offline environment, and promoted a social acceptability of antisemitism normalised this hostility. This report provides a vital in-depth analysis of online antisemitism in the months after the October 7 attack. It empirically compares the year leading up to the attack with what followed. It provides examples...
More Description

Antisemitism surged following the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023. Antisemitism on social media incited offline incidents including hate crimes, reflected the hostile offline environment, and promoted a social acceptability of antisemitism normalised this hostility. This report provides a vital in-depth analysis of online antisemitism in the months after the October 7 attack. It empirically compares the year leading up to the attack with what followed. It provides examples showing the nature of the harm. The report is based on 160 hours of monitoring by experts, 16 hours on each of 10 platforms: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), YouTube, Telegram, LinkedIn, Gab, Reddit, and BitChute. The data has been categorised using 27 subcategories of antisemitism, and summarised into 4 major categories: traditional antisemitism, Israel related antisemitism, problematic Holocaust related content, and incitement to violence. The systematic collection process with the same amount of time spent gathering data for each platform results in a rate of collection and sample size that reflects how prevalent antisemitism was on each platform. This is compared to work using the same methodology over the year leading up to October 7. In total 2898 items of antisemitism were collected. This represents a 539% increase compared to the year prior to October 7. The increase was not uniform. Antisemitism on the alternative social media platform Gab, favoured by the far-right, grew by a factor of 10, compared to TikTok where antisemitism grew by a factor of 4. The category of incitement to violence grew by a factor of 21, while inappropriate Holocaust related content merely tripled. The best takedown rate, when a platform removed content based on a report from a user, occurred on Instagram where 55% of Holocaust related content was removed. One of the worst rates was on Telegram where only 3% of traditional antisemitism was removed. LinkedIn has far more antisemitism than expected, but the most consistently high rates in taking content down. The report shows us how antisemitism changed, and the problems that need to be addressed to recover from this surge in hate against the Jews.