Social media apps such as Twitter have created new opportunities for anti-Semites to disseminate material and organize, according to a paper written by several Indiana University scholars.
The paper, titled “Differences between antisemitic and non‑antisemitic English language tweets,” attempts to identify antisemitic datasets, and how the lack of work in this area presents more issues for hate speech on social media.
“Anti-Semitism in general is, of course, a direct threat to Jews, but it's also a direct threat to democracy. So people who have this antisemitic ideas, they have often an antisemitic mindset that is conspiratorial,” said Günther Jikeli, an Erna B. Rosenfeld professor in Jewish studies and associate professor of Germanic studies. “If there's no counter narrative, if that just becomes a normalized way of thinking, and we see that in some social media circles…[and] there's no one objecting.”
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Just over 11 percent of all conversations on Twitter that included the word “Jews” were identified as antisemitic, from a sample of nearly 2 million tweets between January 2019 and August 2020. Thirteen percent of discussions about Israel in 2020 were identified as antisemitic.
Since Twitter presents a space for misinformation and hate speech there is a lot of data to collect, noted Rhonda Fischer, managing director of the Crisis Technologies Innovations Lab.
Fischer was one of the seven scholars working on the project. Her work focused on gathering and analyzing datasets, which she found challenging in differentiating antisemitic tweets.
“We found out that even slanderous words don’t necessarily mean the tweet is antisemitic. So for me, as a data scientist, it was a lot of data to analyze,” Fischer said. “Sometimes it's because people call out antisemitic tweets and so they end up repeating the tweet as part of calling it out.”
Both Jikeli and Fischer noted more research and awareness in this area needs to continue because as humans as well as machines have their pitfalls when defining and classifying online hate speech.
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Jikeli is also the associate director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, which focuses on anti-Semitism research and education. The Institute is launching a "2023 Datathon and Machine Learning Competition" that will focus on teaching college students how to detect and combat online hate speech.
