In 2020, at least 200,000 anti-Semitic messages were posted in Dutch on social media. This includes tweets, Facebook posts, comments on YouTube videos and general chats on Telegram. The results have been published in a study (.pdf) by the Utrecht School of Data.
Commissioned by the Israel Information and Documentation Center (CIDI) and the Central Jewish Advice Bureau (CJO), the researchers made a first attempt to map the extent of online anti-Semitism in the Netherlands.
In reality, the number of anti-Semitic messages is even greater. The researchers could only analyze the text, not the images. Much of the anti-Semitism is expressed in images, for example with drawings of Jews with traditional stereotypical appearance. Also, some social media databases such as Facebook are not easily accessible for independent research.
Hidden and overt anti-Semitism
Researchers formulated 107 terms to search the Internet for messages “related explicitly or indirectly to Judaism.” These include words like “Jew”, “Israel” or “kippa” and terms frequently used in anti-Semitic expressions such as “Rothschild” or “Soros”. The Rothschild is a German Jewish family involved in many anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The same goes for Hungarian-American businessman George Soros.
Based on 107 search terms, a total of 1.8 million Dutch posts have been found as of 2020. Of these, 9,000 posts were selected, of which the searchers manually determined whether there was anti-Semitism and what kind of anti-Semitism, if any. -Semitism.
Scholars distinguish between implicit antisemitism and overt antisemitism. First, it associates Jews with negative stereotypes, such as being part of the “globalist elite” that is said to be in control.
Overt anti-Semitism occurs when Jews are insulted because they are Jewish or, for example, when there is a “Jewish agenda”. Holocaust denial is also considered outright anti-Semitism.
right conservative angle
Based on the 9,000 viewed posts, a computer model was trained to search for anti-Semitic expressions in the dataset of 1.8 million posts. About 200,000 messages were found to be anti-Semitic.
The largest part, 187,000, was found on Twitter. 88% of these messages were implicitly anti-Semitic, 12% open. Most of the anti-Semitic messages (about 140,000) were sent by conservative right-wing Twitter users and conspiracy theorists.
Among a group of twitterers who mostly tweet in Arabic, the percentage of anti-Semitic tweets in posts about Jews is very high, around 20%, but in absolute terms this is a small group.
Repeat once a year
There is also a lot of anti-Semitism on YouTube and Telegram. Of the 3,700 comments under YouTube videos, nearly 1,000 are anti-Semitic. More than 350 of them: “Forcing Baudet Kaag to admit: D66 supports manipulation of George Soros!” It was released as a video on the Democracy Forum channel, including a video titled.
It is difficult to interpret the results because the study was conducted for the first time. Despite this, CIDI speaks of “a major structural problem of anti-Semitism” among online discussion platforms. CIDI and CJO require that the survey be repeated annually to identify developments and trends.
Source: NOS
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