The extent and nature of antisemitism on Twitter in the UK

Twitter: The Extent and Nature of Antisemitism on Twitter in the UK

Big data is the new lens through which our world is analysed. Crunching hundreds of thousands of lines of code so that we can better understand trends, events and the future is core to many academics, researchers and practitioners across a number of fields. This is no less true in relation to antisemitism, online harm and efforts to make digital spaces safer for users.

As a follow-up to a joint report which analysed the harms occurring through Google’s search platform and on far-right web forums, the Antisemitism Policy Trust and Community Security Trust commissioned the Woolf Institute to probe harms occurring on Google, Instagram and Twitter.

This publication represents the third and final installment of that project: the two previous reports showed that Google’s Safesearch function is not fit for purpose, and that antisemitism and conspiracism are not only co-located on Instagram but that there is antisemitic supply, rather than demand, on the platform.

Taken together, this series identifies and underlines that anti-Jewish racism persists on major social media platforms, and that either the tools for addressing it are not fit for purpose, or the public policies professed by the world’s leading social media giants are at best, poorly enforced and at worst, not worth the paper they are written on.