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Aug. 2021 Copyright © 2021 Daniel Allington Antisemitism and the ‘alternative media’ Daniel Allington with Tanvi Joshi January 2021 King’s College London About the researchers Daniel Allington is Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural Artificial Intelligence at King’s College London, and Deputy Editor of Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism. Tanvi Joshi is an independent scholar. Authorship statement Daniel Allington is the author of this report. Revision history The first draft of this report was submitted on 24 August 2020. This was revised following double-blind peer review, with the final draft submitted on 9 December 2020. Minor corrections were made shortly before publication on 22 January 2021. Funding statement The research presented in this report was supported by a grant from the office of the Government's Independent Adviser on Antisemitism, Lord Mann. The funder played no part in the research, including the analysis or interpretation of the data. Acknowledgements Grateful thanks are due to Lord John Mann for commissioning this research, to Will Allchorn and Matt Bolton for advice in the crucial early stages of the project, and to Siobhan McAndrew and David Toube for comments on the first draft. Suggestions received via anonymous peer review were invaluable. Executive summary • Three of the four ‘alternative media’ platforms analysed were found to promote a negative view of Jews • The fourth was found to promote a negative view of Muslims, but not of Jews (although it sometimes made use of arguments and images that are in other contexts used to stigmatise Jews) • A significant relationship was found between holding antisemitic views and having a positive opinion of each of the three platforms that were found to promote a negative view of Jews • A significant relationship was also found between holding antisemitic views and having a positive opinion of the Russian state-owned propaganda broadcaster, RT (formerly Russia Today) • By contrast, there was no relationship, or a substantially weaker and more conflicted relationship, between antisemitism and evaluation of named ‘mainstream media’ sources • Moreover, drawing on the ‘mainstream media’ in general for political information was associated with lower levels of antisemitism • In the interests of reducing prejudice, it would appear desirable to encourage use of high quality, reputable sources of information at the expense of low quality fringe sources • Partial solutions to the problem could include: o Demonetisation of problematic websites (for example, through withdrawal of advertising) o De-prioritisation of content from such websites in social media news feeds and search algorithms o Guidelines for members or employees of organisations such as political parties, voluntary sector organisations, trade unions, and media companies, both against sharing content or repeating claims from such websites and against providing them with content in the form of interviews, quotations, or stories o In extreme cases, legal or regulatory sanctions against the owners of the websites themselves • However, it is at least as important for government, individual consumers, and other stakeholders (including social media companies) to play their part in ensuring that reputable media-producing organisations are able to remain viable as businesses that can both invest in and promote high-quality content within a democratic regulatory framework 1 The magic of words has transmuted a pernicious medieval superstition into an even more debasing and corrosive modern superstition. — Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews 2 Contents Figures ___________________________________________________________________ 5 Tables ____________________________________________________________________ 6 1. Introduction: antisemitism and the ‘alternative media’ __________________________ 7 1.1 What is antisemitism? _________________________________________________________ 7 1.2 What are the ‘alternative media’? _______________________________________________ 8 1.3 The structure of this report ____________________________________________________ 10 2. Radio Albion, TR News, Skwawkbox, and the Canary: an in-depth analysis _________ 12 2.1 The right wing sites __________________________________________________________ 12 2.1.1 Radio Albion ____________________________________________________________________ 14 2.1.2 TR News _______________________________________________________________________ 18 2.2 The left-wing sites ___________________________________________________________ 21 2.2.1 Skwawkbox _____________________________________________________________________ 23 2.2.2 The Canary _____________________________________________________________________ 28 2.3 Summary __________________________________________________________________ 31 3. Content analysis of Jewish-related articles on four ‘alternative’ sites ______________ 32 3.1 Research questions __________________________________________________________ 32 3.2 Methodology _______________________________________________________________ 32 3.2.1 Sample ________________________________________________________________________ 32 3.2.2 Code development and inter-rater reliability __________________________________________ 32 3.2.3 AnalytiC methodology ____________________________________________________________ 33 3.3 Findings ____________________________________________________________________ 34 3.4 Summary __________________________________________________________________ 35 4. Survey of media use and antisemitic attitudes in the British population ____________ 37 4.1 Research questions __________________________________________________________ 37 4.2 Methodology _______________________________________________________________ 37 4.2.1 Questionnaire ___________________________________________________________________ 37 4.2.2 Sample ________________________________________________________________________ 38 4.2.3 Code development for the open question _____________________________________________ 39 4.2.4 DesCriptive statistiCs ______________________________________________________________ 39 4.2.5 Contextualisation of the ‘very right-wing’ and ‘very left-wing’ samples ______________________ 39 4.2.6 Inter-rater reliability for coding of the open question ___________________________________ 39 4.2.7 Instruments for the measurement of antisemitism _____________________________________ 40 4.2.8 AnalytiC methodology ____________________________________________________________ 41 4.3 Findings ____________________________________________________________________ 41 4.3.1 PerCeptions of the ‘biggest problem’ _________________________________________________ 41 4.3.2 Relationships between antisemitism and perCeptions of the ‘biggest problem’ _______________ 42 4.3.3 SourCes of politiCal knowledge ______________________________________________________ 43 4.3.4 Relationships between antisemitism and sourCes of politiCal knowledge ____________________ 43 4.3.5 Evaluations of specifiC media platforms ______________________________________________ 45 4.3.6 Relationships between antisemitism and evaluations of specific media platforms in the main sample _____________________________________________________________________________ 46 4.3.7 Relationships between antisemitism and evaluations of speCifiC media platforms in the ‘very right- wing’ and ‘very left-wing’ samples _______________________________________________________ 48 3 4.4 Summary __________________________________________________________________ 49 5. Conclusion ______________________________________________________________ 51 References _______________________________________________________________ 54 Appendix I: Codebook for articles _____________________________________________ 63 Appendix II: Tables for Chapter 3 _____________________________________________ 64 Appendix III: Questionnaire __________________________________________________ 65 Appendix IV: Codebook for open question answers