Fighting Online Antisemitism (FOA) Briefing Note – Monitoring Online Antisemitism Related to COVID-19

Since the global onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a noticeable increase in online anti-Semitic content. Presently, with most of the world’s population confined indoors, there has been an increase in the use of the internet and social media. Concurrently, anti-Semitic discourse, which had been slowly increasing over time, has soared. Such content includes conspiracy theories and base hatred. These theories connect Jews and the State of Israel with the onset of the pandemic, with each theory a slightly different manifestation of the same hate. The content is distributed and shared by individual users, in open, closed, or even secret groups on various social media platforms. This report reviews antisemitic online content monitored mainly in English, Spanish and Russian on four leading social media platforms between 17 March and 17 April 2020. Despite an increase in the amount of antisemitic content across all platforms, our own capacity to monitor unfortunately decreased over the last few months. This directly influences the amount of antisemitic content that remains in cyberspace.

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The “New World Order”(NWO) is a conspiracy theory about an emerging global totalitarian shadow government. This post makes a connection between the “NWO” and “Israhell” by claiming Israel is the “epicenter for evil” and was created by “Zionist terrorism”.

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The Tweet claims Israel (Israhell) is weaponizing COVID-19. “Buey” is a version of the Mexican slang “Guey”, which is used in various Latin-American countries.

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This Tweet is an antisemitic poem in Russian. The poem claims that Jews sent COVID-19 to China via mail in order to make you forget about “the murder of Jesus”. The author says that she will never forgive the Jews for killing Jesus and will “give coal” to Jews after the virus passes.

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This Tweet claims compares COVID-19 to the Jews by saying “Jews are a virus that gains your trust and then kills you. Jews are a deadly Virus”.

Monitoring_Online_Antisemitism

The Tweet portrays a conspiracy where Israeli engineers designed the 5G mobile network to eliminate “at least 2/3 of the American population” using the “CoronaVirusHOAX” while making sure Jews are safe from it by not installing the 5G network in Israel. The article also mentions

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Content that was monitored and not removed:

Fighting Online Antisemitism (FOA) Briefing Note – Monitoring Online Antisemitism Related to COVID-19

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