Social media breeding antisemites faster than Third Reich could have dreamed - Angela Eps

Ignorance is the antisemite’s greatest ally. After all, why let facts get in the way of a vile expression of Jew hatred?

Does it matter that students at a recent pro-Palestinian protest had no idea which river or which sea they were chirpily chanting about in their call for Palestine to be free? (For the record, kids, it’s the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea - between which lies the land of Israel and which would have to be obliterated for your mantra to be fulfilled.) Or that when asked about October 7 some protestors had no idea what actually happened? At least they admitted to needing “to be more clued up about the Israel-Hamas conflict”.

But then perhaps the unprovoked and deliberate slaughter of 1400 innocent people in Israel, the rape and mutilation of hundreds more and the kidnapping of more than 230 people, including children, the elderly and the disabled, by Hamas, is a detail that’s easy to overlook.

So where to point the blame?

The expression of antisemitic sentiment demands both opportunity and inclination. Inclination to hate Jews has prevailed, of course, for thousands of years.

But as for opportunity, well now we come to bigoted behaviour`s other great ally. Social media.

Not least Tik Tok, the personalised video sharing platform which has become a fetid swamp of poisonous Jew hatred. So much so that after an apparent surge of antisemitic content and misinformation on TikTok following October 7 Hamas massacre, a group of Jewish celebrities and influencers felt compelled to meet with executives of the video app to express their concern.

"What is happening at TikTok is, it is creating the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis. Shame on you,” stormed actor Sasha Baron Cohen at the meeting.

He added: “If you think back to October 7, the reason why Hamas were able to behead young people and rape women was they were fed images from when they were small kids that led them to hate.”

Tik Tok is a danger on two fronts.

Not only in terms of its content but its ability to proliferate.

Look no further than the video which had a letter written by Osama bin Laden, drenched in Jew hatred, laying out his justification for the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001. The hashtag #lettertoamerica accrued more than 10m views before TikTok blocked searches for it.

And if such numbers bring on a migraine, consider this: TikTok has 1 BILLION monthly active users Out of 4.8bn internet users worldwide, 20.83% use TikTok

Not that antisemitic content on TikTok is anything new.

Back in 2020 the platform had to delete a collection of videos found by the BBC to be using a "sickening" anti-Semitic song about Auschwitz that gained more than 6.5m views (which, given six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust makes for a bleakly sickening counterfactual).

So what’s to be done?

In theory, technology is neutral. Surely it’s the way it’s used that makes it a force for good or evil? You can build an atomic bomb and leave it in a cupboard. It exists, of course, but the damage comes in its detonation not its construction.

The question is, when it comes to social media, can algorithms have the capacity to outplay the rules of science when it comes to bias? Is this opportunity or inclination?

And should it be banned - a clarion call currently being made in the US?

Well, free speech is vital to a free society. But it is a privilege not an automatic right. And if TikTok’s business model isn’t up to the job of weeding out the noxious, Jew-hating content that feeds on impressionable - ignorant - users - then it should be banned.

A shame for those who use TikTok as a force for the good - such as, say, spreading useful wellbeing information, but a price that must be paid if it is to stymie the dissemination of foul content.

For remember.. those ancient tropes surrounding hatred of Jews never went away.

They bubble underground, always looking for an effective way to deliver their venomous message. It must be said that TikTok continues to make clear it doesn't tolerate "hate in any form," including anti-Semitism. But unless its filters are effective in stopping the spread of anti-Jewish feeling then the world’s oldest hatred will continue to flourish on the world`s most popular video app.