Central OC Times

Researchers from seven universities have uncovered methods in which antisemitic content manages to evade online censorship and social stigma. This study, published in PLOS One, delves into the nature of hate speech's survival on the internet, particularly through indirect means. The authors examined two now-deplatformed subreddits previously frequented by QAnon members. While these spaces contained minimal explicit antisemitic content, more than one-third of users engaged with implicit antisemitic discourse.

"Explicit antisemitic utterances come at a cost ranging from social ostracism to deplatforming, so they’re frequently expressed in veiled ways online. Implicit antisemitic content and conspiracy narratives about Jews have been on the rise, especially on moderated platforms," said Jeffrey Kopstein, a political science professor at the University of California, Irvine.

Dana Weinberg, a sociology professor at Queens College, City University of New York, added insight into the mechanics of implicit language. "At the post and even at the sentence level, these co-occurrences operate to provide the ingroup with a roadmap or dictionary for interpreting the meaning of implicit terms and generalized conspiracy narratives when they occur without direct reference to Jews," she explained.

For this project, Kopstein, alongside David Frey of the United States Military Academy at West Point, created a repository of 892 explicit and 278 implicit terms related to antisemitic rhetoric through collaboration with a wider 10-person research team. Efforts to combat hate speech online, according to Kopstein, necessitate an understanding of these tactics. "With this study, we’ve provided a generalized method for examining how hate is subtly expressed in online communities," Kopstein stated.

Funding for this study was provided by the Air Force Research Laboratory and the David Berg Foundation. The team included multiple scholars and students from institutions such as Queens College, Columbia University, and Princeton University.

The published study can be accessed at the PLOS One website.