A Quantitative Approach to Understanding Online Antisemitism

A new wave of growing antisemitism, driven by fringe Web communities, is an increasingly worrying presence in the socio-political realm. The ubiquitous and global nature of the Web has provided tools used by these groups to spread their ideology to the rest of the Internet. Although the study of antisemitism and hate is not new, the scale and rate of change of online data has impacted the efficacy of traditional approaches to measure and understand these troubling trends. In this paper, we present a large-scale, quantitative study of online antisemitism. We collect hundreds of million posts and images from alt-right Web communities like 4chan's Politically Incorrect board (/pol/) and Gab. Using scientifically grounded methods, we quantify the escalation and spread of antisemitic memes and rhetoric across the Web. We find the frequency of antisemitic content greatly increases (in some cases more than doubling) after major political events such as the 2016 US Presidential Election and the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville. We extract semantic embeddings from our corpus of posts and demonstrate how automated techniques can discover and categorize the use of antisemitic terminology. We additionally examine the prevalence and spread of the antisemitic "Happy Merchant" meme, and in particular how these fringe communities influence its propagation to more mainstream communities like Twitter and Reddit. Taken together, our results provide a data-driven, quantitative framework for understanding online antisemitism. Our methods serve as a framework to augment current qualitative efforts by anti-hate groups, providing new insights into the growth and spread of hate online.Comment: To appear at the 14th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2020). Please cite accordingl

Never again!: how the lessons from Auschwitz project impacts on schools in Scotland

As the education for citizenship agenda continues to impact on schools in Scotland, and with the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) in conjunction with the Scottish Government organising its Lessons From Auschwitz Project for Scottish students and teachers until 2011, this study aimed to investigate the school processes by which students were chosen to participate in the Lessons From Auschwitz (LFA) project; examine student and teacher perceptions of the LFA Project; investigate the impact the LFA Project has on student citizenship values and on their schools and communities; and investigate the impact the LFA Project has on teachers

Antisemitic Memes and Naïve Teens: Qualitative and Quantitative Impacts of the Internet on Antisemitism, the Evolution of Antisemitism 2.0, and Developing Adaptable Research Methodologies into Online Hate, Abuse, and Misinformation

This thesis posits that the advent of the internet has resulted in qualitative and quantitative changes to antisemitism, particularly in the period since web 2.0. Comparing online antisemitism with other forms of online abuse, this thesis demonstrates limits in the research on broader manifestations of online discrimination due to inconsistent methodologies and quantities of research. A key consideration is how online antisemitism both differs and intersects with broader manifestations, including cyberbullying, cyber-racism, and abusive conspiracy movements. Through consideration of these intersections, the broader history of antisemitism, and the functions of internet technology, profiles of major online sources for antisemitism are presented. Beyond illustrating how the internet has changed antisemitism alongside other manifestations of abuse and discrimination, this thesis also develops and tests a research model that can be adapted to different fields and disciplines. Simulated online conversations between young adults and a Holocaust denier evaluate how effective young adult web users are at recognising, researching, responding to and refuting antisemitism online, and what tools can be designed to assist them. Antisemitism has undergone significant qualitative and quantitative change due to the internet and now reaches more young people who are ill-equipped to resist its online manifestations. While expertise in the specific nature of antisemitism is needed to tackle this problem, the response can involve adaptable methodologies of benefit to the study of online hate more broadly. There is benefit in collaboration across researchers, fields, and disciplines to provide holistic explanations and solutions to some common aspects of online hate, abuse, and misinformation

Antisemitism on Social Media Platforms : Placing the Problem into Perspective

This chapter provides a survey of the existing quantitative research on antisemitism and social media. Through doing so, it argues that the sheer quantity of antisemitism on social media is much less than commonly perceived. In addition, the chapter argues that quantitative research often neglects counter-narratives calling out antisemitism, which are an important counterpoint to include in antisemitism research on social media. Then, the chapter discusses how specific components of platform design help explain why antisemitism is likely to surface on some plaftforms but not others. Through this theoretical lens, the chapter compares the design of major social media platforms to online forums. The comparison highlights why memes typically originate in online forums and then are pushed towards more public and mainstream social media platforms. Ultimately, the chapter argues that future research on antisemitism and social media should approach studying antisemitic content across online spaces, with specific attention to the effects of such content on users’ potential for radicalization

Gendering Experiences of Anti-Semitism: A Quantitative Analysis of Discrimination in Europe

Little is known about the gendered dimension of anti-Semitism. Emerging from a literature review on social identity theory, anti-Semitism, sexism, and Jewish feminism, I demonstrate the urgency of examining the link between gender and experiences of anti-Semitism, using the FRA’s 2018 dataset “Experiences and Perceptions of Antisemitism: Second Survey on Discrimination and Hate Crime against Jews in the EU,” a large-scale survey of Jews in thirteen countries across Europe. The independent variable is gender identity. Five dependent variables relate to experiences of sex/gender discrimination, physical attacks, offensive/threatening comments, offensive gestures/staring, and online harassment. Using five control variables—being identifiable as a Jew in public, country, Jewish identity, education level, and Jewish population in one’s neighborhood—I engage with descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression analysis to analyze my variables. The findings show that while women are more likely to experience gender discrimination, men are significantly more likely to experience anti-Semitism

Decoding implicit hate speech: The example of antisemitism

This article deals with the problem and the different levels of implicity in the context of antisemitic hate speech. By means of authentic examples stemming from social media debates, we show how alluded antisemitic concepts can be inferred on the basis of conservative interpretation. We point out the role of different sources of knowledge in reconstructing the ideas implied in a statement as well as potential sources of error in the interpretation process. The article thus focuses on the methods and findings of the interdisciplinary research project "Decoding Antisemitism" conducted at the Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) at TU Berlin. By doing so, it explains the procedure of qualitative content analysis as a fruitful approach to understand the actual repertoire of antisemitic hate speech online

Accounting for Contemporary Antisemitism: A Four-Dimensional Framework and a New Dataset

Existing scholarship on contemporary antisemitism tends to sacrifice breadth for depth, typically focusing on a specific dimension of the phenomenon or a single national or ideological context. This nearsightedness threatens to limit our understanding of current antisemitism because separate parts of a complex picture are studied in isolation, and because crucial questions about temporal and cross-national variation remain understudied. To help remedy this situation, this article introduces a more comprehensive conceptual and empirical framework along with a new dataset intended to encourage the study of antisemitism as a multidimensional, cross-national, and dynamic phenomenon. The framework conceptualizes antisemitism in four core dimensions—attitudes, incidents, cultural imagery, and Jews' exposure—and specifies relevant variables and indicators, thus facilitating future research and data collection efforts. To supplement the framework, the article introduces a new dataset (DIMA—Dimensions of Antisemitism) featuring publicly available data covering three of the four dimensions: attitudes, incidents, and exposure. Based on patterns emerging from these data, hypotheses for further study are suggested. These contributions are intended to prepare the ground for a new and theoretically more ambitious research agenda in the field of contemporary antisemitism research.Accounting for Contemporary Antisemitism: A Four-Dimensional Framework and a New DatasetacceptedVersio

Holocaust Education in Arkansas: An Exploration of Policy Process and Implementation

The Holocaust was the attempted extermination of the Jewish people--a fact previously considered to be common knowledge. However, recent national surveys find that Arkansas students have the lowest levels of knowledge of the Holocaust in the United States. A recent law mandated the teaching of the Holocaust for 5-12th grade public school students in Arkansas, however, little is known about the policy process and implementation of such a mandate. Given the magnitude of the gaps in the literature on this topic, this dissertation uses a three article format to address specific gaps and make specific contributions to the literature by addressing three following research questions: (1) what does the current literature say about Holocaust education policy for grades K-12 in the United States? (2) How did Holocaust education legislation pass in Arkansas? And, (3) How interculturally aware are Arkansas teachers, and do they hold any antisemitic biases? First, we know very little about state Holocaust education policy, not only in Arkansas, but really of any states in the United States. The gap is a national gap in knowledge for the United States, so a scoping review was used for the first article, to understand what the literature says about Holocaust education policy for K-12 in any state. The findings from this article indicate that what little research exists on the topic is not centered in public policy, but rather in teacher education. Thus, this article offers a unique contribution to the field of public policy, adding the social justice component of re-centering policies on historically marginalized communities. Building on this knowledge, the second article makes a unique contribution to the field of public policy with a case-study of the stakeholders involved in passing the Holocaust education mandate in Arkansas. Findings indicate that a grassroots coalition of Jewish activists, inspired by a Holocaust survivor, engaged faith and political communities to pass Holocaust education legislation, despite having less than 2,000 Jews in the entire state. Finally, the third article addresses the question of implementation, and how interculturally aware Arkansas teachers are, exmainig if they hold any antisemitic bias. Not only have previous studies not examined a relationship between antisemitic bias and intercultural competence, but this has never been examined in teachers tasked with implementing Holocaust education. There was a strong relationship between antisemitic bias and a lack of cultural competence, which makes sense—if one expresses more bias and hatred towards one group, they would likely have lower cultural competence. Findings indicate that the sample of Arkansas teachers in this study were not interculturally competent, and many hold antisemitic views. While these are concerning results, this was a small sample, and reinforces a conclusion of all three articles: more research is needed on this topic. Each of these three articles offer independent contributions, however, when taken together, there is an understanding of the lack of attention given to Holocaust education and the concerning pitfalls of doing so. There are simply too many gaps in knowledge at such a critical moment of policy passage and implementation to warrant a one-article dissertation, necessitating a three-article format to ensure a strong contribution could be made to the literature