When Israel faced a wave of stabbing attacks in 2015 fueled by social media incitement, the government and activists like myself were vocal about the connection between social media incitement and real-world violence.
Fast-forward six years. The same myths about al-Aqsa are being used on the same platforms, social media, to ignite the same violence, targeting Jews. Only this time, it’s not just a problem of incitement on Arabic social media – it’s occurring around the world.
After Facebook and other platforms finally cracked down on explicit incitement to violence in Arabic back in 2016, the plethora of antisemitic content took center stage.
For over a year, leading activists and organizations have called on social media platforms to use the IHRA definition of antisemitism as a framework for identifying and dealing with antisemitic speech.
While progress has been made, the failure of social media networks to step up has never been more clear than with the most recent operation in Gaza and the aftermath, which Jewish communities around the world are still dealing with.
Throughout Israel’s operation in Gaza, social media became a battleground almost as important as the real-life battlefield.
Even in the days leading up to the violence, social media were flooded in English, Arabic and other languages with factually incorrect information about Sheikh Jarrah, which was then echoed in the international press.
As if on cue, Iran and Hamas took advantage of the outcry to urge violence at the Temple Mount, and then began attacking Israel, but you wouldn’t know any of that from what was said on social media.
Throughout the 11-day operation, Jews and supporters of Israel were bombarded with hate speech, death threats and aggressive spam attacks on their posts and direct messages. I myself received over 100,000 hateful mentions on Twitter alone. Teens on TikTok were harassed and threatened, accused of supporting “war criminals” or “apartheid,” leading to real-life isolation.
Journalists from mainstream networks like the BBC even tweeted content with comments like “Hitler was right.” In fact, this same delightful phrase was tweeted over 17,000 times in one week alone from May 7 to May 14, and was even trending on Twitter at one point during the week.
In one horrific incident from TikTok, a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor who wished her followers “Shabbat Shalom” received a torrent of abuse from “pro-Palestinian” activists who left comments such as “happy Holocaust” and “peace be upon Hitler.”
On a personal note, I have numerous friends and acquaintances who have been cut off by lifelong friends over the Gaza conflict, all because they were “supporting genocide of Palestinians.” Whereas before it was possible to at least have a discussion, the groupthink facilitated by social media (and criminally inaccurate reporting in the press) has overtaken the most basic of logic, even in many interpersonal relationships. The results have been devastating.
Jewish communities around the world are reeling from attack after attack, with a 500% increase in antisemitic incidents being reported. Places that were once considered “exceptional” for their philosemitic communities, like New York City, are suddenly battlegrounds where Jews are being spit on in the streets and violently attacked. Palestinian activists are calling to “rape Jewish women” in Jewish neighborhoods of London, synagogues have been vandalized with swastikas in Utah and Arizona, Jews have been lynched on the streets in multiple cities across the US and the UK, and a Holocaust museum has been vandalized with antisemitic graffiti in Florida.
The attacks are continuing online as well. Jewish content creators have been targeted for weeks, even when not talking about anything to do with being Jewish or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Palestinian flags and antisemitic questions about why they “support genocide” among other outrageous comments.
Jewish teens are now scared to speak out about their identity online or in person, frightened to be “canceled” by a mob of bigots who ironically don’t even have the facts on their side when it comes to Gaza.
All of this is the byproduct of intentional misinformation spread primarily through social media.
THE REALITY is that Israel was fighting a war against an internationally recognized terrorist organization, Hamas. Israel was not fighting a war against the Palestinian people.
The reality is that Israel used precision weapons to strike exclusively terrorist sites, and evacuated them ahead of time.
The reality is that 200 people dying in a military conflict is very sad, but certainly not a genocide.
The reality is that Israel is not committing anything even remotely close to ethnic cleansing, that Israel is not even slightly an apartheid state, and Israel continuously makes tremendous efforts to avoid civilian casualties while defending its civilians.
But social media didn’t care about the reality; they cared about the false narrative being promoted, even when it costs Jewish lives around the world.
There is a price for this misinformation, and it’s higher than we should be willing to pay. Social media platforms have failed us, as have most of the media. We must demand accountability.