Antisemitism on Twitter and Niche Social Media Platforms

The final session at Social Media & Society 2018 today is one I’m moderating, and starts with a paper by Ivan Kalmar, Nicholas Worby who explores the connections between Islamophobia and antisemitism in extremist online communication. Islamophobic politicians go to great lengths to claim that they are not antisemitic, in order not to be painted as fascists, yet give enough hints to their followers to still be seen as anti-Jewish.

One of the common targets in this complicated manoeuvre is George Soros, the Hungarian-Jewish billionaire who is generally accused of funding liberal civil society institutions and has been attacked by authoritarian leaders from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to Russia’s Vladimir Putin (but also by Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu).

The project explored such rhetoric using the right-wing, ‘free speech’ social media platform Gab, which is popular especially with users banned or threatened with being banned from Twitter, and examined the conversations about Soros here in comparison with those on Twitter. The project captured tweets mentioning ‘Soros’ via the Twitter API, and posts from Gab containing ‘Soros’ using the undocumented Gab API (which appeared to provide a full complement of relevant posts, but this is not verifiable).This excludes ‘re-posts’, the equivalent to retweets, however.

These data were further substituted by the ((([name]))) convention, which is often used by the far right to indicate perceived Jewishness or Jewish influence. Such use is more prevalent on Gab than on Twitter. Further, the project explored the URLs being shared, and found considerable sharing of fascist image memes as well as YouTube videos across both platforms, while explicitly fascist and neo-Nazi sites were shared far more widely on Gab than Twitter.

There is a need to further explore these datasets, and to conduct further qualitative data analysis as well as network mapping. Additionally, correlating user practices by dual users on Gab and Twitter may also be an option.