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Computational Propaganda, Jewish-Americans and the 2018 Midterms

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Computational Propaganda, Jewish-Americans and the 2018 Midterms A report from the Center on Technology and Society OCT 2018 Computational Propaganda, Jewish-Americans and the 2018 Midterms: The Amplification of Anti-Semitic Harassment Online Our Mission: To stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all. ABOUT CENTER FOR TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY AND THE BELFER FELLOWS In a world riddled with cyberhate, online harassment, and misuses of ADL (Anti-Defamation technology, the Center for Technology & Society (CTS) serves as a resource League) fights anti-Semitism to tech platforms and develops proactive solutions. Launched in 2017 and and promotes justice for all. headquartered in Silicon Valley, CTS aims for global impacts and applications in an increasingly borderless space. It is a force for innovation, producing Join ADL to give a voice to cutting-edge research to enable online civility, protect vulnerable populations, those without one and to support digital citizenship, and engage youth. CTS builds on ADL’s century of protect our civil rights. experience building a world without hate and supplies the tools to make that a possibility both online and off-line. Learn more: adl.org The Belfer Fellowship program supports CTS’s efforts to create innovative solutions to counter online hate and ensure justice and fair treatment for all in the digital age through fellowships in research and outreach projects. The program is made possible by a generous contribution from the Robert A. and Renée E. Belfer Family Foundation. The inaugural 2018-2019 Fellows are: • Rev. Dr. Patricia Novick, Ph.D., of the Multicultural Leadership Academy, a program that brings Latino and African-American leaders together. • Dr. Karen Schrier, an associate professor at Marist College and its founding director of the Games and Emerging Media Program. • Samuel Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, who works with Jigsaw, Google’s think tank. Computational Propaganda, Jewish-Americans and the 2018 Midterms: The Amplification of Anti- Semitic Harassment Online ® eff, a Jewish-American reporter at a major U.S. Correspondingly, our analyses suggests that tools news outlet, first experienced anti-Semitic political like social media bots, and tactics including doxxing, Jattacks online during the 2016 U.S. presidential disinformation, and politically-motivated threats, have election. Soon after the election, he began to receive been used online during the 2018 midterms to target harassing messages over social media that used Jewish Americans. According to interviewees, veiled religious slurs or featured photoshopped images of him human users—rather than automated accounts—often containing violent or graphic content. Each time one deliver the most worrisome and harmful of his stories got traction online—or featured details anti-Semitic attacks. on topics such as white nationalism, Donald Trump, or libertarianism—he was sent photoshopped images of Anonymity and automation are integral features of his face in a gas chamber or was threatened with the computational propaganda—the use of algorithms public release of his address and contact details. “It has over social media in attempts to manipulate public become something that I expect to happen,” he said, “I opinion. Anonymity allows the people who spread digital don’t even think about it anymore.” For Jeff, the 2016 disinformation and political harassment to do so without election was a major impetus for allowing the online fear of reprisal or repercussion. Automation, often in the sphere, and public platforms including Twitter and Reddit, form of social media bots or automated profiles that look to become openly hostile places for him and people like real users, allows these same individuals to scale like him. their offensives. Both anonymity and automation have been used in online propaganda offensives against the The number of Jewish people living in the United States Jewish community during the 2018 midterms. During is estimated to be between 4.2 million and 12 million, this contest, political bots—which explicitly focus on the wide range due to religious versus ethnic distinctions political communication online—are playing a significant (Steinhardt Social Research Institute, 2016; DellaPergola, role in artificially amplifying derogatory content over 2017). For many of these individuals—especially those Twitter about Jewish people. Human users, however, still in the public eye—social media platforms have become accounted for the majority of derogatory Twitter traffic. inhospitable for both general communication and as People used the protective power of anonymity over a forums for discussing public life. This report explores variety of social media platforms to spread harmful or the ways in which online propaganda, harassment and misleading content about Jewish American people. Many political manipulation are affecting Jewish People in human-led efforts had features of organized propaganda the runup to 2018 U.S. midterm elections. In the course campaigns and made use of twitter bombing—barraging of our research, members of this group have described hashtags associated with the Jewish community with a marked rise in the number of online attacks their highly politicized, and sometimes hateful, content in community is experiencing. This is proving especially an effort to demobilize, coopt and interrupt normal true during electoral contests and major political events. communication and organization over social media. Each of the Jewish American experts interviewed for this study in such events was the largest escalation in a single year has experienced online attacks in 2018. These respondents since the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) first began recording stated that many of these onslaughts came from what they incidents in 1979. Schools, from kindergarten through to high considered extremist groups in American politics: the emergent school, were the most common locations of anti-Semitic alt-right, white nationalists and neo-Nazi organizations. Those incidents, following a 94% increase. In the words of ADL CEO interviewed spoke about the rise of an emboldened anti-Semitic Jonathan Greenblatt: “Kids repeat what they hear. And so in community online and consistently correlated this rise with the an environment in which prejudice isn’t called out by public election of Donald Trump. figures, figures of authority, we shouldn’t be surprised when we see young people repeat these same kind of tropes” The following report is an analysis of computational propaganda, (Cohen, 2018). the Jewish American community, and the 2018 elections. As part of the wider paper series focused on “humanizing the effects A staggering expansion of online harassment coincided of computational propaganda” this empirical work details the with, and arguably fomented, the increase in offline anti- ways in which the Jewish socio-religious population in the U.S. Semitism. Fringe Internet communities, such as 4chan, is being disproportionately targeted with disinformation and 8chan, and Gab allowed for the propagation of such ideas, abuse during this crucial political moment. We use a mixed which quickly spread to Twitter, Reddit, and other mainstream methods approach in this research, deploying both qualitative online communities (Glaser, 2017; Marwick & Lewis, 2017). and quantitative analysis in order to generate both a culturally An analysis of over 100 million posts on Gab and 4chan’s deep and statistically broad understanding of how computational Politically Incorrect message board (/pol/) found that, propaganda is being leveraged against this community. between July 2016 and January 2018, the use of the terms Interviews with five prominent Jewish Americans reveal themes “Jew” and “kike,” a derogatory term for Jewish people, more in the ways in which disinformation and political attacks flow than doubled on /pol/ and dramatically increased on Gab against and within the community. Analysis of 7,512,594 tweets (Finkelstein et al., 2018). Spikes also occurred in the use of over a period from August 31, 2018 to September 17, 2018 shows both terms following President Trump’s inauguration and the the prevalence of political bots in these efforts and highlights 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, which is believed groups within the U.S. political spectrum most involved in anti- to be the largest white supremacist rally in the United States in Semitic attacks. In fact, as many as 30 percent of the accounts at least a decade (ADL, 2017). messaging using derogatory terms gathered in this data set appear to be highly automated. In the final section, we discuss On Twitter, Jewish journalists have faced an onslaught the implications of our research, as well as policy suggestions for of online persecution and trolling. Between August 2015 social media platforms, governmental actors, and civil society. to July 2016, a study featuring 800 journalists found that they received 19,253 “overtly anti-Semitic tweets,” with ten Literature Review prominent Jewish journalists receiving 83% of the tweets (ADL, 2016). The top five most common words in the Following revelations about the role of computational harassing accounts’ bios were: Trump, conservative, white, propaganda in the 2016 election, there has been an undisputed nationalist, and America. Two journalists in particular were rise in white supremacist activities and overt anti-Semitism heavily targeted: Julia Ioffe and Jonathan Weisman. Ioffe was (Woolley & Guilbeault, 2017; Astor, 2018). From 2016
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