• Anti-Zionism as Antisemitism: How Anti-Zionist Language from the Left and Right Vilifies Jews

    Seven decades after Israel’s founding, some criticism of the country continues to promote age-old antisemitic tropes. Even before Israel was founded, conversations about the Zionist movement and the creation of the State of Israel at times included explicit anti-Jewish animus or espoused ideas historically wielded against Jewish communities. Today, many anti-Zionist activists continue to perpetuate this language.

  • Study Links Hard-Right Social Media with Incidents of Civil Unrest

    An increase in social media activity on “hard-right” platforms — those that purport to represent viewpoints not welcome on “mainstream” platforms — contributes to rightwing civil unrest in the United States, according to a new study. A new Yale-led study finds evidence that social media activity on hard-right platforms contributes to political unrest offline. “The magnitude of the effect we found is modest but two characteristics of social media and civil unrest caution against dismissing it,” said Yale sociologist Daniel Karell.

  • Democracies Must Regulate Digital Agents of Influence

    It would be a mistake to limit the public policy debate to traditional state-on-state espionage or major power rivalry. Such platforms and the advent of the eerily relatable artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT are society-changing technologies that cannot be dismissed as benign or treated as a public good closed to any regulatory or governance process.

  • China and Russia Sharing Tactics on Internet Control, Censorship

    Beijing and Moscow have been sharing methods and tactics for monitoring dissent and controlling the Internet. For a few years now. The two countries have been deepening their ties for the past decade, and controlling the flow of information online has been a focal point of that cooperation since 2013. Since then, that cooperation expanded through a number of agreements and high-level meetings in China and Russia between top officials driven by a shared vision for a tightly controlled Internet.

  • How Russia Turned America’s Helping Hand to Ukraine into a Vast Lie

    Russia’s sustained disinformation campaign about a fictional U.S. bioweapons program in Ukraine is an example of how, “In a world that connects billions of people at a flash, the truth may have only a fighting chance against organized lying,” the Washington Post writes. “Disinformation is not just “fake news” or propaganda but an insidious contamination of the world’s conversations. And it is exploding.”

  • Antisemitism, False Information, and Hate Speech Find a Home on Substack

    Substack continues to attract extremists and conspiracy theorists who routinely use the site to profit from spreading antisemitism, misinformation, disinformation and hate speech. Platforms with more lenient content moderation policies, like Substack, provide fertile ground for the spread of hateful rhetoric and false information – a known catalyst for offline harm and violence.

  • China Accused of Meddling in Canada’s Elections

    Allegations are mounting that China may have interfered in Canada’s most recent federal elections to favor Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party. Chinese information campaign appeared to have influenced votes in districts with large ethnic Chinese population.

  • Education and Awareness Are Key to Stopping Online Radicalization

    The current battlefield for terrorism is not a faraway country but the computers and phones right next to us. Terrorists have taken advantage of this technology to allow conflict to transcend its geographic borders. They know that reaching one sympathetic viewer can create catastrophic consequences in support of their agenda. The social network is now an environment where everyone is vulnerable to encountering propaganda or misinformation online, making everyone susceptible to radicalization.

  • Hard-Right Social Media Activities Lead to Civil Unrest: Study

    Does activity on hard-right social media lead to civil unrest? With the emergence and persistent popularity of hard-right social media platforms such as Gab, Parler, and Truth Social, it is important to understand the impact they are having on society and politics.

  • Understanding Antisemitism on Twitter After Musk

    New research has found a major and sustained spike in antisemitic posts on Twitter since the company’s takeover by Elon Musk on October 27, 2022. Researchers found that the volume of English-language antisemitic tweets more than doubled in the period following Musk’s takeover.

  • Extremist Propaganda Soars to All-Time High in 2022

    In 2022, there has been a significant increase in racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist (RMVE) propaganda efforts, which included the distribution of racist and antisemitic fliers, stickers, banners, graffiti, and posters, as well as laser projections - with a total of 6,751 cases reported in 2022, compared to 4,876 in 2021.

  • 5 Key Takeaways from State of Antisemitism in America Report 2022

    For too many American Jews, being Jewish no longer feels as safe as it once did. And the younger those American Jews are, the more they experience that threat firsthand.

  • Americans’ Trust in News Continues to Decline – but Local News Are Much More Trusted Than National News

    A new study explores the disconnect between newsrooms’ efforts to rebuild the public’s trust and the continued decline of confidence in that effort. The study distinguishes between the practical and emotional dimensions of trust, and finds that that more than twice as many Americans have higher emotional trust in local news than in national news.

  • Foolproof: A Psychological Vaccine Against Fake News

    Even an optimistic account of our ability to spot fake news has to come to grips with the fact that not everyone needs to be fooled in order for misinformation to be highly influential and dangerous. After all, major elections are often decided on small margins, and cyber propaganda is playing an increasingly important role in tearing down the fabric of our democracy.

  • Since Elon Musk’s Takeover, Twitter Has Seen a Rapid Rise in Gen-Z, Neo-Nazi Antisemitism: Study

    A new study has demonstrated that extremist elements have viewed Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter as an opportunity to rejoin the social media platform en masse. The study also indicates that a sea change is taking place on Twitter with respect to the proliferation of extremist antisemitic content.