Hate speechAn estimated 4.2 million anti-Semitic tweets shared on Twitter in one-year period: Study

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has just issued a new report analyzing anti-Semitic speech on Twitter, providing the first-ever snapshot of the trends and themes of anti-Semitism on the social media platform over the course of a one-year period.

Using proprietary research strategies to evaluate Twitter for thousands of possible anti-Semitic expressions, including classic stereotypes, code words, symbols, and conspiracy theories, and conducting a human review to scan for sarcasm or other non-anti-Semitic uses of such terms, the ADL’s Center on Extremism found that at least 4.2 million anti-Semitic tweets were shared or re-shared in English on Twitter over the 12-month period ending 28 January 2018. Those 4.2 million tweets were sent from an estimated three million Twitter handles. The margin of error is 3 percent.

The research shows that the number of anti-Semitic tweets fluctuated between a low of 36,800 the last week of July 2017 to a high of 181,700 in the first week of December 2017. The average number of anti-Semitic tweets per week: 81,400.

The ADL says that the new ADL report, Quantifying Hate: A Year of Anti-Semitism on Twitter, was released during ADL’s National Leadership Summit, a three-day conference of more than 800 leaders and activists from across the country in Washington, D.C.

“This new data shows that even with the steps Twitter has taken to remove hate speech and to deal with those accounts disseminating it, users are still spreading a shocking amount of anti-Semitism and using Twitter as a megaphone to harass and intimidate Jews,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, ADL CEO. “We hope this report will create a renewed sense of urgency among all social media providers that this problem is not going away and that they need to find innovative new ways to tamp down the spread of hatred online.”

The report also shows that subject matter experts are crucial to accurately defining anti-Semitism and gauging user sentiment.

“Algorithms and artificial intelligence will be key to identifying hate online, but human experts are needed to define the problem and, at least in the initial stages, to help the systems assess sentiment and eliminate false positives,” Greenblatt said. “Our experts created a data set of 55,000 tweets which were manually reviewed for the presence of anti-Semitism. We look forward to sharing our research and expertise with tech companies and academics as they work on this problem.”