US

Spike in anti-Semitic Twitter abuse triggered by US election

Jewish journalists in particular targeted in barrage of 2.6m hostile and offensive tweets

A man holds an image of Pepe the Frog, a character that has come to be associated with anti-Semitism and racism, during a Donald Trump campaign event in New Hampshire: According to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League, hundreds of Jewish journalists have been targeted by anti-Semitic attacks on Twitter during the 2016 presidential campaign. Photograph: Damon Winter/The New York Times

Nicky Woolf
Wed Oct 19 2016 - 21:00

The 2016 presidential election is causing a “significant uptick” in anti-Semitism on Twitter, and journalists – particularly Jewish journalists – are especially targeted, according to a new study by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

Looking between August 2015 and July 2016, the group found 2.6 million tweets containing anti-Semitic language.

The study focused on 19,253 overtly anti-Semitic tweets aimed at 800 journalists, 68 per cent of which were sent by just 1,600 Twitter users, which the study said confirms a persistent attack on journalists by a small cohort of Twitter users.

Just 10 journalists received of 83 per cent of these 19,253 tweets; Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart News editor and outspoken critic of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, received 7,400 of the anti-Semitic tweets, including one calling him a “Christ killer”.

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Another example picked out by the study is Julia Ioffe, whose profile of Melania Trump for GQ magazine caused a storm of anti-Semitic responses on Twitter, including a tweet calling her a "filthy Russian kike" and another that included photographs from Nazi concentration camps, the study has shown.

Shapiro told the Anti-Defamation League that it was “amazing what’s been unleashed. I honestly didn’t realise they were out there. It’s every day, every single day.” He said that his wife and infant son had also been targeted. “When my child was born there were lots of anti-Semitic responses talking about cockroaches,” he said.

“I think this is a first-of-a-kind study that we’ve put out, that we think is instructive in terms of understanding how anti-Semitism is spread in the modern age through social media,” said Oren Segal, the director of the group’s Center on Extremism. “It reinforces the work that the ADL does in terms of needing to find ways to mitigate anti-Semitism, [and] threats of anti-Semitism, no matter where they are.”

Trump ‘surrogates’

The study is careful not to say that the Trump campaign encouraged or advised users to tweet anti-Semitic remarks but points out that many of the attackers “publicised their role as self-appointed surrogates for Trump and their allegiance to the white nationalist cause”.

The five most common words in the core 1,600 cohort of attackers were: Trump, conservative, white, nationalist and American, the study said. The article also found that spikes in anti-Semitic tweets often occurred after high-profile moments in the Trump campaign.

About 500 million tweets are sent every day, and around 200 billion tweets are sent every year. According to an October 2014 study by the Pew Research Center, 40 per cent of adult internet users have experienced some kind of online harassment.

A spokesperson for Twitter said: “We don’t believe these numbers are accurate, but we take the issue very seriously. We have focused the past number of months specifically on this type of behaviour and have policy and products aimed squarely at this to be shared in the coming weeks.”

– (Guardian service)

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