In 2022, we founded CyberWell, an independent, tech-rooted nonprofit combating the spread of antisemitism online, and simultaneously launched the first-ever open database of online antisemitism. At the time, Kanye West’s public meltdown, blatant attacks on Jewish people and the spikes in online antisemitism that ensued were considered watershed moments in online antisemitism and were routinely condemned — but the nightmarish past year of surging Jew-hatred in both digital and offline spaces make Ye’s antisemitism look like a blip in the wave of celebrity-fueled antisemitic hate culture.
The year 2024 was marked by additional celebrities and internet personalities getting on the antisemitism train, no pun intended, openly participating in Holocaust denial, Oct. 7 denial, conspiracy theories blaming the Jews for everything including assassinating JFK, and falsely characterizing Judaism as a satanic and pedophilic cult. These old and deeply anti-Jewish ideas were promoted by the likes of Candace Owens, Dan Bilzerian, Susan Sarandon, John Cusack and others. While the concern about celebrities, athletes and influencers using their voice to promote Jew-hatred is rooted in their large fan bases, the assets with the largest following are the engagement algorithms of our favorite social media platforms.
The past year was the worst in online antisemitism for a simple but alarming reason: a new prevalence in overt hostility and calls to violence against Jewish people, heightened by the widespread sharing of and reveling in graphic social media posts showcasing the blood, gore, physical assault and even death of Jewish victims.
This cycle started during the most successful hijacking of major social media platforms by the terrorist group Hamas, who, on Oct. 7, 2023, broadcast the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on mainstream platforms reaching millions of people worldwide.
In one of our most recent reports, CyberWell’s online antisemitism monitoring found that the flooding of social media with graphic anti-Jewish content caused over a doubling in the rates of open calls for violence and physical harm against Jewish people online, rising to 13.3% of vetted online antisemitism after the attack, up from only 5.1% before the attack in 2023. The sharpest spike in open calls to violence against Jews was during the first three weeks after the Oct. 7 attack, when over 61% of vetted antisemitic content in Arabic and over 25% of online content in English was consistent with overt calls to violence.
Overall, CyberWell detected a 36% increase in online antisemitism in the 11 months after Oct. 7 (October 2023 through August 2024), with the sharpest increase of 86% in detected online Jew-hatred in the three weeks after the attack.
However, in addition to the high levels of engagement with the content of the attack itself, Hamas sympathizers started an online Oct. 7 denial campaign immediately after the massacre. The Oct. 7 denial campaign mirrored fabricated accusations and conspiratorial beliefs of Holocaust deniers, but quickly normalized denialism for larger swaths of the mainstream public relying on social media for emergent information in the fog of war. Additionally, according to Cyabra, a company contracted by Elon Musk during the purchase of then-Twitter, the conspiracy was further augmented by fake accounts at a rate of 20% to 40%, depending on the account.
What happened online in fall 2023 became the new framework for digital Jew-hatred in 2024: the flooding of online spaces featuring physical harm to Jews and their communities, followed by the denial of atrocities committed against them as a precursor to justification and open calls for more violence.
CyberWell saw this cycle repeated online during the pogrom against Jewish tourists in Amsterdam last month. Though clearly documented, influential anti-Israel voices were quick to deny the digital evidence that the attack was organized in its nature via Telegram, WhatsApp and Instagram, potentially led in part by Middle Eastern Uber and taxi drivers, at least one of whom recorded himself running Israeli soccer fans over in the streets and uploaded it onto social media. Further, the same voices justified the ambush-style “Jew-hunt” by claiming that it was a reaction to certain fans tearing down the Palestinian flag from residential homes and singing anti-Arab songs. Within 24 hours of the attack, the inverted red triangle, an official terror symbol of Hamas, alongside the word “Amsterdam” was posted over a thousand times, reaching 8 million users on the platform X alone, calling for the violence to continue. Additionally, under seemingly innocuous hashtags like #peopleofallahineurope, social media platforms were used to call for more violence against Jews at additional soccer matches across Europe.
The real-time response of social media platforms has proved to be a complete failure in the face of repeating surges in violent antisemitic attacks that are amplified, praised and mimicked online. But the repercussions of this systematic failure to enforce digital policy at scale do not only affect the Jewish community. From the online veneration of Luigi Mangione, who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, to the dark Letter to America trend on TikTok and the Instagram influencer who became known as the Timothee Chalamet of the Yemeni Houthis, social media platforms are becoming supercharged megaphones for glorifying vigilantism and terrorism, even though that content is in direct violation of their policies.
As big tech CEO’s have made their respective pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to drop off million-dollar checks to support the inauguration of the incoming President Donald Trump, and ahead of the Supreme Court discussion of the TikTok ban next month, it is up to all of us to remain engaged and demand effective legal reform to spur social media platform accountability and effective enforcement of digital policies. Otherwise, in 2025, we will continue to be fed a steady diet of algorithmically reinforced hatred, violence and calls to terror with very real consequences offline.
Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor is the founder and executive director of CyberWell, an independent tech nonprofit working with social media platforms to monitor and catalog antisemitic rhetoric while improving enforcement and enhancement efforts through community standards and hate speech policies.
