A tech nonprofit that monitors and fights antisemitism on social media says in a new report that its analysis of 910 potentially antisemitic social media posts found more than a third outright denied or distorted facts about the October 7th invasion of Israel and ensuing atrocities, abductions, and massacre by Hamas-led terrorists.
Click here for the full report.
The 313 antisemitic posts appeared on Facebook, Instagram YouTube and X, reaching nearly 26 million viewers on all platforms, according to the CyberWell organization.
During the massive attack on that day — Shabbat Simchat Torah — the Hamas-led terrorists deliberately recorded and in some cases even live-streamed their atrocities, thus using the feeds to create mass psychological terror via the social media platforms.
Of the verified denial dataset more than 38 percent of content denied that Hamas militants and their allies raped Israelis during their attack, more than 36 percent claimed that Israel perpetrated or was directly responsible for the actions of Hamas militants.
The remaining posts aligned with several varying sub-narratives, including that Israel profits from the massacre. These posts were engaged with (reacted to, commented on, shared/retweeted) more than 901,233 times.
The report was released in advance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, set for January 27.
While the Holocaust and October 7th are distinct historical events, today antisemites with algorithmically enhanced social media platforms exploit denial as a form of delegitimizing Jewish victimhood and spreading anti-Jewish hate in mainstream opinion, the organization warns.
“While all mainstream social media platforms have community standards policies prohibiting the denial of violent events, which has been extended in practice to include Holocaust denial, these companies have yet to apply this policy to the denial of the events of October 7, the largest violent atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust,” said CyberWell Founder and Executive Director Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor.
“This is a policy gap and we are calling on all social media platforms to proactively make the change to their policies to effectively stop the spread of hate and protect Jewish users online,” she added.
CyberWell uses AI technology to monitor for posts in English and Arabic that violate the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which the organization’s analysts then report to platform moderators alongside the community standards and hate speech policies the post violates.
