November 20, 2020 By David Andrew Weinberg
The Yemeni Embassy in Washington recently released a report featuring primary source documents on the core ideology of the Houthi insurgents who seized Yemen’s capital in 2014. That report, authored by Embassy official Salem Baafi, makes a case that antisemitism and other forms of hate form an essential part of the worldview and motivation of Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
The Houthis’ oft-invoked slogan is itself antisemitic…
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November 20, 2020 The latest Facebook Transparency Report, which covers July 2020 to September 2020 (Q3 2020), raises some alarming concerns around the prevalence of hate speech on the platform, leaving ADL with several questions that demand clear answers. ADL published a blog post about the opaque nature of Facebook’s transparency reports in January 2019. Many of the same problems that existed in the 2019 reports continue in Facebook’s most recent transparency efforts.
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November 17, 2020 Facebook has been vocal about its recent efforts to suspend and ban hateful, conspiratorial and violent content from its platform. And yet a great deal of extremist content remains.
As of November 16, 2020, even a cursory search of Facebook brings up white supremacist, racist and antisemitic pages. The following is a sampling of extremist groups and individuals currently active on Facebook.
Antisemites and Holocaust Deniers:
TruNews is a fundamentalist…
Remarks by Jonathan A. Greenblatt, ADL CEO November 09, 2020 Thank you all for tuning in today for the 5th annual Never is Now conference. There is so much to discuss, but before we get started, I want to pause and remember Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks who left us too soon this weekend. He was an extraordinary leader, a remarkable rabbi, a gifted scholar and a beautiful man. He will be missed. May his memory always be for a blessing. We gather today -- virtually -- at what feels like the start…
November 05, 2020 A subset of high-profile, misinformation-laden posts reached a combined potential audience of more than 108M followers, with over 1.1M likes and retweets prior to ADL reporting them to Twitter on November 4, 2020. From the time ADL reported the tweets to Twitter on November 4 until our final check on November 9, we found that the misleading tweets that remained unaddressed by the social media platform had been liked or retweeted more than 297,000 additional times. Tweets…
October 16, 2020 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
After years of urging from ADL and other civil rights organizations, Facebook will ban posts that deny the Holocaust. A video has gone viral on social media of a man shouting at a Hasidic Jewish man for not wearing a mask on an empty New York City street. YouTube on Thursday became the latest social media giant to take steps to stop QAnon, the sprawling right-wing conspiracy theory community whose online fantasies about a cabal of satanic pedophiles…
October 15, 2020 Nearly half of American adults experience online harassment and nearly one third experience severe harassment, but society still struggles with understanding the deep impact of online hate. Too often, we see “online hate” contrasted with “real world violence.” Trust us: to victims and targets of swatting, doxing, cyberstalking, and cyberharassment, the abuse they experience online is very real.
We know that digital abuse pushes targets offline…
October 11, 2020 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
Jewish members of Congress are facing antisemitic attacks on Twitter in the lead-up to the November election, according to a new report from ADL. Facebook said it is escalating the campaign against QAnon, pledging to remove any Facebook pages, groups and Instagram accounts aligned with the conspiracy group. The FBI says it thwarted what it described as a plot to violently overthrow the government and kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Read on…
October 08, 2020 At the Extremes: The 2020 Election and American Extremism
In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) Center on Extremism in conjunction with ADL’s Center for Technology and Society are releasing a series of news briefs on topics of concern regarding the role extremism plays in our current political environment.
Here's Part 3:
Conspiracy Theories and Anti-Asian Hostility on Twitter
Who/What: After President…
October 07, 2020 “Like it or not it’s about to become a ‘significant time in American history’: Patriots vs. traitors…Start preparing now: food, ammo, fuel…ballots and/or bullets. God knows my heart, and my aim is true.”
Such a message would not be a surprising discovery on extremist platforms like Telegram or Gab, but we are increasingly seeing this violent and apocalyptic rhetoric on Facebook “Patriot” pages, populated largely by…
October 06, 2020 Leila Khaled, longtime active leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and who has engaged in PFLP terrorist operations, keynoted an October 3, 2020 public webinar during which she expressed explicit support for violence and deep animus toward Zionists.
The webinar was convened by the far-left “anti-imperialist” group International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS). In her session, Khaled claimed that Jews,…
October 02, 2020 By David Andrew Weinberg
On September 12th, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized the Iranian government for promoting an antisemitic libel about 9/11 as well as for announcing it will host another Holocaust cartoon contest. Sadly, it appears that repulsive antisemitic cartoon competition is officially now underway.
At the time of Secretary Pompeo’s tweet, little information was available about this worrisome new…
October 02, 2020 Leila Khaled is a longtime active leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and is well-known for her role in the hijacking of two civilian airliners, TWA Flight 840 in 1969 (bound for Tel Aviv from Rome) and El Al flight 219 in 1970 (traveling from Amsterdam to New York City). In 1997, PFLP was designated as a terrorist organization by the United States Department of State, which cites the group as having carried out “large-scale…
October 01, 2020 A small but vocal segment of anti-Israel activists have engaged in inflammatory rhetoric in response to the recent normalization deals between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which were inked in a ceremony on the White House lawn September 15. Since the Israel-United Arab Emirates deal was announced August 13, critique from some has veered into conspiracy theories (that at times have incorporated antisemitic tropes) and language justifying violence and demonizing…
September 26, 2020 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
The nation continues to mourn the loss of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first Jewish woman to serve on the Supreme Court and a pioneering advocate for women’s rights. The late Justice will be the first woman to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol on Friday. A grand jury in Jefferson County, Ky., has indicted a former Louisville police detective on three charges of wanton endangerment in the March shooting that resulted in the death of 26-year…
September 23, 2020 Over the years, a small but concerning number of US anti-Israel groups and activists have expressed support for groups or individuals who are known to have engaged in terrorist activity in the name of the Palestinian cause. While properly protected by the First Amendment, such rhetorical support can implicitly legitimize terrorism; it also diminishes prospects for meaningful dialogue on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Though infrequent, praise and support for US…
September 17, 2020 Since Israel’s founding in 1948, only two countries have moved to establish ties with the Jewish State – Egypt in 1978 and Jordan in 1994. Last week saw two additional countries – the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain – sign normalization agreements with Israel, an indication that hostile regional attitudes towards Israel are shifting. And indeed, there are reports that additional Arab countries may …
August 31, 2020 Under the guise of anti-censorship and free speech, video-hosting service BitChute has become a hotbed for violent, conspiratorial and hate-filled video propaganda, and a recruiting ground for extremists.
BitChute founder Ray Vahey’s concept for the platform came from, in his words, “seeing the increased levels of censorship by the large social media platforms in the last couple of years. Bannings, demonetization, and tweaking algorithms to send…
August 20, 2020 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
An FBI Twitter account tweeted out a link to a PDF containing the antisemitic “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” as well as FBI documents related to it, with no other context. President Trump on Wednesday offered encouragement to proponents of QAnon, a viral and dangerous conspiracy theory. According to a new study, Facebook “actively promotes further Holocaust-denial content to that user” and “has been unwilling…
August 19, 2020 On August 19, one of the FBI’s official twitter handles, the FBI Records Vault, disseminated a link labeled “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.” There has been widespread confusion about the FBI’s motives for doing this, and concern that in doing so the FBI is spreading an antisemitic text. The Protocols is a notorious antisemitic forgery created at the turn of the 20th century by the Czarist secret police and describes an alleged secret plan of…