There were 2.6 million tweets containing language commonly found in anti-Semitic speech sent out between August 2015 and July, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) report released today “Anti-Semitic Targeting of Journalists During the 2016 Presidential Campaign.”
Of those, it found nearly 20,000 “overtly anti-Semitic tweets” were directed at 800 journalists, with 10 journalists receiving 83 percent of those tweets.
The 14-page report put out by the ADL’s Task Force on Harassment and Journalism states anti-Semitic tweets were often published by supporters of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and by conservatives. The document adds, however, that the ADL is not suggesting Trump supports the tweets themselves.
“This report identifies some self-styled followers of presidential candidate Donald Trump to be the source of a viciously anti-Semitic Twitter attack against reporters. Accordingly, we wish to make it clear that based on the statistical work we have performed, we cannot and do not attribute causation to Mr. Trump, and thus we cannot and do not assign blame to Mr. Trump for these ugly tweets,” it states.
“Accordingly,” continues the report, “while we cannot (and do not) say that the candidate caused the targeting of reporters, we can say that he may have created an atmosphere in which such targeting arose.”
The report does not mention Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Journalists spotlighted in the report, the first of two to be released by the ADL in connection with a survey of anti-Semitic online activity from August 2015 to July, include Julia Ioffe, who wrote a profile of Trump’s wife, Melania, in a 2016 issue of GQ magazine; conservative journalist Ben Shapiro, former editor-at-large of Breitbart, and others.
Ioffe was attacked after the publication of her story with a tweet that called her a “filthy Russian kike,” according to the report.
Shapiro, who has said that he will never vote for Trump, was called a “Christ-killer,” according to the report. He was the top-targeted journalist among the anti-Semitic tweets, according to the report, followed by Yair Rosenberg, senior writer at Tablet, and Jeffrey Goldberg, now editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
In gathering data, the ADL interviewed journalists impacted by anti-Semitic harassment; searched for tweets using a “broad set of keywords … designed by [the] ADL to capture anti-Semitic language”; and compared tweets “received by a list of 50,000 journalists” with the 2.6 million results yielded by its initial search.
According to the report, Twitter users often write in code “to avoid censure and potential exclusion.” For example, white supremacists, in an attempt to “avoid tech-based approaches to isolate online harassment,” substitute the word, “kikes,” with “skypes.”
“There is reason to conclude that the numbers in this report — especially the number of anti-Semitic tweets received by individual journalists — are conservative,” the report says.
It focused on the social media platform Twitter “because it is the primary social media platform used to perpetrate these attacks on journalists, according to the journalists themselves,” the report says.
A Twitter spokesperson expressed doubt about the accuracy of the ADL findings.
“We don’t believe these numbers are accurate, but we take the issue very seriously. We have focused the past number of months specifically on this type of behavior and have policy and products aimed squarely at this to be shared in the coming weeks,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement.
Twitter’s policy states, “You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease. We also do not allow accounts whose primary purpose is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories.”
The ADL plans to publish a follow-up report outlining recommendations for how to respond to anti-Semitism online during its Nov. 17 event, “Never Is Now: The ADL Summit on Anti-Semitism,” in New York City.
In the wake of increasing reports of harassment of journalists expressing criticism of Trump, the ADL announced June 1 its convening of a Task Force on Harassment and Journalism.
“We thought it was important to put this task force together to understand how anti-Semitism spreads online and in modern society because journalists being targeted was something a little different, a little new for us,” Oren Segel, director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism, said in a phone interview. “We have been monitoring anti-Semitism online for 30 years but we hadn’t quite seen it in this context, so we figured it was important to try to understand what was happening.”
