It will hit more than just bots

Antisemitism on Twitter: The Threat of Musk’s Free Speech and the Emergence of Anti-American Propaganda

The threat was rising when billionaire entrepreneurel Musk pledged that the bird is free after completing his purchase of Twitter.

It’s easier to use a platform for bad things. Pro Russian accounts used the Ohio train crash to promote anti-American propaganda. The new account verification system open to anyone who pays $8 a month improved the credibility and reach of the campaign.

The chair of Digital Planet, which carried out the analysis, said that the toxicity ofTwitter has greatly increased post-Musks walking into that building.

Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter has slashed its staff, relaxed some of its content moderation policies and reinstated a number of incendiary accounts that were previously banned. Those moves raised concerns that Musk’s Twitter could contribute to a rise in public displays of hate and antisemitism offline.

These platforms are the starting point for false narratives, says Stringhini. When those narratives are on mainstream platforms, they explode. They go out of control because people see them and they are covered by the media.

James Piazza, who studies terrorism at Pennsylvania State University, is scared when he sees people using inflammatory speech on social media. There is a circumstance where you can have more violence.

Rebekah Tromble, political scientist at George Washington University, says that regulations on the way from the European Union may make Musk’s ‘free speech’ rhetoric impractical. The EU will require social-media companies to protect themselves against illegal content and misinformation in the years to come. In theory, Twitter and other platforms could try to create separate policies and practices for Europe, but that would probably prove difficult in practice, Tromble says. “When it’s fundamental systems, including core algorithms, that are introducing those risks, mitigation measures will necessarily impact the system as a whole.”

Over the coming weeks, Stringhini expects that researchers will launch studies comparing Twitter before and after Musk’s takeover, and looking at changes in the spread of disinformation, which user accounts are suspended, and whether Twitter users quit the platform in protest at new policies. Tromble intends to monitor campaigns of coordinated harassment on Twitter.

A Jewish lawmaker who spoke about the problem of antisemitism on Twitter during a House Oversight hearing this week focused on the company was later bombarded with antisemitic messages on the platform, he explained in a letter to new owner Elon Musk on Thursday.

Moskowitz and many other Democrats on the subpanel used their allotted time to grill the former Twitter executives testifying at the hearing about the company’s policies for policing hate on the platform. During his questioning, Moskowitz also rebuked former President Donald Trump for hosting white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago last year. He brought a large copy of a hateful post that Fuentes had tweeted at Moskowitz, telling the room, “No, not all Republicans are Nazis, but I gotta tell you, Nazis seem really comfortable with Donald Trump. So I have questions about that.”

Numerous incidents targeting Jews have been documented in recent months. Just a few weeks ago, on two different occasions, Jewish men in Los Angeles were shot coming out of synagogue by a suspect who has been charged with federal hate crimes. The previous month, someone lobbed a Molotov cocktail at a synagogue in New Jersey. The month before that, a Jewish man was attacked in New York’s Central Park by a man who shouted “Kanye 2024” and antisemitic insults, police said.

Greenblatt said the ADL continues to flag “batches of antisemitic content” to Twitter, but he said the company has only taken action on “a fraction of them” since Musk acquired the company. He also raised concerns about the staff cuts and the reinstated accounts that were banned previously.

In February, free access to the application programming interface is likely to end, as it allows people to build bot to automatically post and respond to tweets. Elon Musk, who took over Twitter in October last year, has long said he wants to scour the platform of bots, and has said that charging a minimum of $100 a month to access the API will “clean things up greatly.”

Due to the risks of granting researchers access to the data, social networks are no longer giving researchers access to their data. If an academic uses free access to a platform’s API to identify a massive issue with state-sponsored disinformation, or problems with content moderation that allow hate speech to fester unchecked, it could cause headaches for the site. As a result, many social media platforms choose to simply lock out or limit researchers from analyzing their platforms, or place unfeasibly large prices on getting API access. Lorenz-spreen says that dependence is an intolerable situation for independent research.

In the past few weeks alone, academic researchers have used free API access to track all activity on the platform in a 24-hour period, map how insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the US government on January 6, 2021 coordinated on the platform—and even estimate the proportion of users that are bots on the platform. This type of research will become much more difficult.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal forced Facebook to impose restrictions on its access to its application programming interface last year.

The iDRAMA Lab: Investigating Hate Speech on Twitter in the Context of the Jihadist-Censorship Problem

The iDRAMA Lab is an analysis of hate speech on social media, which Jeremy was a member of. He has done that with other companies and is trying to get more taxpayer money by using federal funding agencies.

Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

That a man was arrested after claiming he wanted to kill all the Jews in Michigan’s government should startle even a jaded country. That it doesn’t only highlights the depths of the problem.

Looking at Nessel’s comments on Twitter, I was struck by the call to take the threats seriously. After confirming she was one of the targets, she added, “It is my sincere hope that the federal authorities take this offense just as seriously as my Hate Crimes & Domestic Terrorism Units takes plots to murder elected officials.”

Still, if the suspect has shown us the recipe for this toxic concoction, he has also revealed its antidote: pushing back against and removing as much as possible those same ingredients from our society.

The Social Media Age of the Internet: The Rise and Fall of Antisemitism, Hate and Hate at the Number of Minorities

At this time, the account is still up, because of the crumbling safeguards. It shows a trail of anger, threats and wild accusations against Jews.

There’s social media, often a digital vehicle for hate, which last year became turbocharged by a change of ownership: Elon Musk bought Twitter, and the platform became an even more powerful conduit for antisemitism and other forms of hate.

Donald Trump hosted one the country’s most notorious antisemites at his Mar-a-Lago home in November. Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, stated that antisemitism is on the rise.

Trump only expected Ye, the rapper formerly known as Donald Trump, because he didn’t know who Nick Fuentes was. It was Ye that had already become an antisemitic celebrity with a series of antisemitic social media posts which spawned a wave of disturbing incidents, according to the ADL.

It presents a serious challenge to the nation. To counter the threat, people across society must refute these false ideas, help safeguard people who are being targeted, and call out those who promote their crazy ideas.

That’s why it was disappointing when the agenda for a recent House Democratic Caucus retreat included talks about defending Asian Americans and the LGBTQ community against hate crimes and other attacks, but somehow forgot about the minority that comprises by far the largest percentage of religion-based hate crimes, even when the statistics excluded some of the cities with the greatest numbers of Jews.

Something changed in the US a few years ago. The air in the country began to get a bit hostile. Prejudices that in the past might have been expressed in private are regularly blasted on social media. Conspiracy theories can be heard on some networks. Promoters of hate can now dine with the powerful. And violence is on the rise.

Something is rotten in America, but where is it coming from? Is it from irresponsible social media platforms that are chasing profits, or from news networks that lack respect for the truth, or from politicians that are trying to bolster their electoral chances?

They started climbing in 2016 after political atmosphere shifted and extremists began to chant “Jews will not replace us.” When a new president defended them and conspiracy theorists expanded their audience, they began climbing again. The country’s polarization, already intense, went into overdrive. But that’s only part of the story.

The Holocaust is coming: The role of social media in reducing antisemitism in the U.S. Holocaust education and propagation

Researchers tried to get a comment from Twitter, but the response was an email showing a poop emoji. That’s the same response Musk sent after another study, back in December, found an explosion of racist tweets after he bought the platform.

The number of Americans who think anti-Jewish conspiracy theories are on the rise has doubled in the past two years, according to a survey by the ADL.

Students everywhere should learn about the Holocaust. A low number of Americans even know basic facts about it, despite most states not requiring it. That needs to change. Young people, in particular, must understand the scale of what occurred and what brought about the murder of six million Jews in the middle of Europe.

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Both political parties, Republicans and Democrats, must do a more forthright job of calling out antisemitism in their midst. No party is immune from it, from the bizarre rantings about “Jewish space lasers,” to the offensive claims saying support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins.”

It’s also time for Congress to tackle the jungle of hatred that has grown on social media. The leaders and owners of the platforms have a duty to prevent them from becoming recruiting grounds for extremists. Penalties are attached to negligent behavior to make the ethical responsibility a legal one.

Last December, President Joe Biden established an interagency group to develop a national strategy to combat antisemitism. That was an important move. The government can’t do everything.

It is everyone’s responsibility to make hatred feel safe. It is everyone’s responsibility to help remove that air of hostility that has been poisoning America and make the United States a country that forcefully rejects prejudice.