In the days after Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, the social media platform saw a “surge in hateful conduct,” which its then safety chief put down to a “focused, short-term trolling campaign.” New research suggests that when it comes to antisemitism, it was anything but.
Rather,
antisemitic tweets have more than doubled over the months since Musk took
charge, according to research that I and colleagues at tech firm CASM
Technology and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank conducted.
Between June and Oct. 26, 2022, the day before Twitter’s acquisition by Musk,
there was a weekly average of 6,204 tweets deemed “plausibly antisemitic” –
that is, where at least one reasonable interpretation of the tweet falls within
the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of the term as “a
certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.”
But from
Oct. 27 until Feb 9, 2023, the average was 12,762 – an increase of 105%. In
all, a total of 325,739 tweets from 146,516 accounts were labeled as “plausibly
antisemitic” over the course of our study, stretching from June 1, 2022 to Feb.
9, 2023.
Finding
antisemitism with AI
To
identify plausibly antisemitic tweets, my co-authors and I combined 22
published hate speech-identifying algorithms into a single mechanism and used
even more machine learning to see which combinations of decisions led to the
correct result. We then passed through all tweets – over a million in total –
that contained any one of 119 words, phrases, slurs and epithets related to
antisemitism.
No such
process is perfect. We estimate our model to make a correct decision about 75%
of the time. We also no doubt missed some antisemitic tweets not containing any
of those 119 key words, as well as those taken down before early December when
we collected the data.
We then
used an algorithm to draw out 10 different themes of antisemitism seen in the
tweets. Some centered around the use of specific antisemitic derogatory
epithets. Others alluded to conspiracy theories concerning hidden Jewish
influence and control.
Antisemitic
tweets directed at Jewish investor and philanthropist George Soros warranted
its own category. He was mentioned more than any other person in our data, over
19,000 times, with tweets claiming he was a member of a hidden globalist,
Jewish or “Nazi” world order.
Another
theme were tweets defending the rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, who had made a
number of antisemitic remarks after he had his account briefly reinstated by
Musk.
Our
research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, also found around 4,000 of the
antisemitic tweets were focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These
variously claimed that the conflict was caused by Jews, or that Jews secretly
caused the U.S. to support Ukraine. They also contained direct antisemitism
directed against the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish.
Musk
rolls back content moderation
Musk’s
acquisition of Twitter came on the back of what I have observed as a decadelong
trend among tech giants to take more responsibility for hate speech,
harassment, incitement, disinformation and other harms lurking in the
information flowing through their platforms. Over that period, companies such
as Facebook and Twitter gradually enacted policies to respond to extremism,
hate speech and harassment, or increase “civility,” as Twitter itself described
it in 2018, and built out the teams and tools to enforce them.
Musk, a
self-professed “free speech absolutist,” pointed the platform in a different
direction after taking control. In short order, Twitter’s independent Trust and
Safety Council was dissolved, previously banned accounts were reinstated and
over half of Twitter’s staff was laid off or simply left – including many of
those responsible for enforcing the company’s hate speech policies.
As
someone who has tracked hate speech on places like Twitter for around 10 years,
I believe the changes to Twitter’s moderation practices are only partly to
blame for the jump in antisemitism on the platform.
The
media spectacle surrounding Musk’s takeover, along with his very vocal views on
free speech, likely also encouraged exactly those people to join or rejoin the
platform who had fallen foul of its previous attempts to confront hate. Our
research gives some backing to this theory. Some 3,855 accounts we identified
as posting at least one plausibly antisemitic tweet joined Twitter in the 10
days after Musk took over. This is, however, only a small proportion of the
146,516 accounts that sent at least one antisemitic tweet over the course of
the entire study.
Little
effect on curbing hate speech
A surge
in hate speech on Twitter was flagged by researchers in the weeks after Musk
took over, concerns the billionaire dismissed as “utterly false,” having
earlier vowed to “max deboosted & demonetized” hateful tweets.
If
Twitter has been de-amplifying antisemitism, our research shows almost no
evidence of it. Before Oct. 27, antisemitic tweets received an average of 6.4
“favorites” and 1.2 retweets. Since then, they have averaged 6 “favorites” and
1 retweet. Although such engagement isn’t a perfect measure for visibility,
tweets made much less visible to users would generally receive less engagement.
We also
attempted to measure takedowns of antisemitic tweets. On Feb. 15, 45 days after
we initially collected the data, we tried to re-collect all the tweets we
identified as antisemitic. Tweets can be unavailable for lots of reasons, and
Twitter’s enforcement is only one of them. Imperfect though this is, it does
give us a tentative glimpse of what might be happening in regard to the removal
of antisemitic posts. And across those dates, 17,589 antisemitic tweets were
taken down – 8.5% of the total.
Rising
tide of antisemitism
Our
findings come at a time when many fear growing threats to Jewish communities.
In 2021, the Anti-Defamation League tracked the highest number of antisemitic
incidents – including harassment, vandalism and assaults – in the U.S. since
they started tracking numbers in 1979. And this is not just a U.S. phenomenon;
in the U.K., the Community Security Trust has recorded a similar spike in
anti-Jewish activity, while in Germany, anti-Jewish crimes surged by 29% over
the pandemic.
Studying
social media has shown me again and again just how powerfully it helps to form
the cultures and ideas that underlie its users’ behavior. Ultimately, the
proliferation of tweets that hold Jews responsible for all the world’s ills,
that circulate dark conspiracies of control and cover-up, or that fire
derogatory attacks directed toward Jews, can only support antisemitism online –
and in the real world.
https://theconversation.com/antisemitism-on-twitter-has-more-than-doubled-since-elon-musk-took-over-the-platform-new-research-201830
***Carl
Miller is a Partner of CASM Technology and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for
Strategic Dialogue. They conduct a wide range of public-interest social media
research on online harms for a range of philanthropic, foundation and public
sector institutions.