Football clubs, political parties and all manner of other organisations made sure to post on social media, wishing us a happy Pesach. Invariably, underneath each message was a stream of antisemitic, hate-filled replies.
Why is this post different from all other posts? It isn’t. Day in, day out, social media users and the platforms’ algorithms spread this bile. The scale of the problem, and the failure of the social media companies to deal with it adequately, was outlined in a report by the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) and the Antisemitism Research Centre (ARC), released last week.
Researchers monitored Instagram for a focused 96-hour period. They identified 100 antisemitic posts that were not just on the Meta-owned app, but pushed by the platform. This relatively small number of posts generated 5.3 million likes and 3.8 million shares. That meant they could potentially reach an estimated 280 million users. The researchers called the issue a “failure of amplification controls”.
Some of the posts play on the typical nasty tropes around finance and power. The word “Rothschild” is prone to appear. “Some posts go further”, according to the report, “bringing in religious or occult themes and portraying Jews not just as powerful, but also inherently evil”.
“Simply put, this is evidence of a broad systemic failure on the part of Instagram and Meta,” according to CAM CEO Sacha Roytman Dratwa. “When a platform actively recommends content that dehumanises Jews to mass audiences, we are no longer talking about a simple oversight or a mistake in the algorithmic design. We are talking about infrastructure that normalises hatred at scale that must be addressed immediately.”
Most sinister of all were accounts purporting to be Rabbis, but far from being learned community leaders, were AI-generated images. They were used to spread antisemitic content, again, usually about money and control. The creators are not particularly original, but they are determined. And they have reach.
ARC researchers found 12 distinct personas of this type. One, “Rabbi Goldman”, had accrued over 1.4 million subscribers while pushing antisemitic conspiracy theories. When I looked for this account, it appeared that Instagram had actually removed it. However, several others using the same rabbi, variations of the same name and posting the same kind of content had popped up. It did not take too close an inspection for me to recognise that this “Rabbi” was little more than computer code. However, that hadn’t stopped a vast number of other people spreading the rhetoric. Either they had not spotted it was AI, or they simply did not care – they liked the message, whoever and wherever it came from. It is going to get harder and harder to spot AI-generated content as the tools quickly improve and we all need to be prepared for it.
I do not actually believe Instagram or its rivals want to be known for having antisemitism on their apps. However, there is no denying that they benefit from it. Hatred boosts engagement, making the platform more valuable to users and advertisers. Perhaps it is the brands that can provide at least part of the solution. They need to increase the pressure on the platforms. Refuse to spend their dollars with social media platforms until they clean up their act. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but Pesach is all about miracles.
Make no mistake, these posts do matter. Online hate matters. Ideas that spread around Instagram or TikTok or Twitter find themselves playing out in real life all too quickly. As the report puts it:
“When users see the same ideas repeated across different posts, and those posts have high numbers of likes and shares, this shapes how those ideas are perceived. Over time, this kind of repetition makes antisemitic narratives feel more common, more accepted, and more credible than they actually are.”
It adds: “When dehumanising content is not only present but actively pushed by recommendation systems to millions of users, it can’t be treated as passive hosting. The system is effectively selecting and amplifying narratives linked to real-world harm.”
Why not attack a synagogue or Jewish school? Everyone knows the Jewish people are terrible, right? It said so on Instagram. This is not about stymieing free speech or limiting debate about Israel. I would never advocate for such things. This is about stopping blatant hatred and demanding the social media companies take responsibility. As the report warns, “exposure [to antisemitism] is not accidental, it is engineered”.
In the Haggadah it is the Egyptians who face the plagues, unleashed by Hashem in support of the Jews. Today, the plague of online hate comes directly for us. It is time for those who allow this to act.
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