Only 25% of antisemitic posts and other content on social media were removed in 2021, a new report released Monday by an Israeli watchdog group revealed.
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According to the findings released by Fighting Online Antisemitism, in 2021, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Telegram, YouTube, Facebook and VK combined received 3,922 reports of antisemitic content but removed only 1,004 such posts.
Fighting Online Antisemitism is a nongovernmental organization established in 2020. Its mission statement is "to combat online antisemitism through volunteer training, reporting hateful content, and raising awareness of the phenomena of cyberhate."
The Israeli watchdog group is one of only a handful of similar organizations worldwide that monitor and reports antisemitic content online.
A segmentation of the data shows that 1,732 antisemitic Twitter posts were reported across 2021, of which 391 were removed (22.5%). On Instagram, 1,039 posts were reported as offensive and 329 (31.7%) were removed, and of the 577 Facebook posts reported as antisemitic, 133 were removed (23%).
Of the 114 YouTube videos reported as including antisemitic content, 28 (24.5%) were removed, and on TikTok, of the 101 clips reported as offensive, 35 (34.6%) were removed.
Russian social media network VK saw 359 posts reported as antisemitic and removed 88 (24.5%) of them.
The report noted that overall, VK was found to contain the most virulent posts – in no less than 16 languages. Some 57.9% of the offensive posts were in English, 13.8% in Russian, 13.1% in Arabic, 9.8% in Spanish, 2.4% in French, and an additional 3% in other languages.
FOA noted in its report that there are differences between each of the social media platforms, which affects how they can be monitored – a process that is mostly manual at this point.
The group is currently developing technologies that in the future will be able to decipher and discover antisemitic content in addition to the manual search.
"The policy of removing [offensive] content is inconsistent and it varies between the social media platforms and their response time is grossly lacking," FOA head Tomer Aldubi explained.
The attention social media captains pay to this issue must improve, he stressed.
"There are platforms like LinkedIn, Telegram or VK with which there is little-to-no communication and we can see that there is an increasing number of antisemitic users who try to spread hate using these platforms.
Aldubi noted that Fighting Online Antisemitism hopes to increase its online operations in 2020. "We call on anyone who can assist to join us and make sure antisemitic content is removed," he said.
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