November 05, 2020 A subset of high-profile, misinformation-laden posts reached a combined potential audience of more than 108M followers, with over 1.1M likes and retweets prior to ADL reporting them to Twitter on November 4, 2020. From the time ADL reported the tweets to Twitter on November 4 until our final check on November 9, we found that the misleading tweets that remained unaddressed by the social media platform had been liked or retweeted more than 297,000 additional times. Tweets…
Search Results
121 Results
October 16, 2020 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
After years of urging from ADL and other civil rights organizations, Facebook will ban posts that deny the Holocaust. A video has gone viral on social media of a man shouting at a Hasidic Jewish man for not wearing a mask on an empty New York City street. YouTube on Thursday became the latest social media giant to take steps to stop QAnon, the sprawling right-wing conspiracy theory community whose online fantasies about a cabal of satanic pedophiles…
October 15, 2020 Nearly half of American adults experience online harassment and nearly one third experience severe harassment, but society still struggles with understanding the deep impact of online hate. Too often, we see “online hate” contrasted with “real world violence.” Trust us: to victims and targets of swatting, doxing, cyberstalking, and cyberharassment, the abuse they experience online is very real.
We know that digital abuse pushes targets offline…
October 11, 2020 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
Jewish members of Congress are facing antisemitic attacks on Twitter in the lead-up to the November election, according to a new report from ADL. Facebook said it is escalating the campaign against QAnon, pledging to remove any Facebook pages, groups and Instagram accounts aligned with the conspiracy group. The FBI says it thwarted what it described as a plot to violently overthrow the government and kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Read on…
October 08, 2020 At the Extremes: The 2020 Election and American Extremism
In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) Center on Extremism in conjunction with ADL’s Center for Technology and Society are releasing a series of news briefs on topics of concern regarding the role extremism plays in our current political environment.
Here's Part 3:
Conspiracy Theories and Anti-Asian Hostility on Twitter
Who/What: After President…
October 07, 2020 “Like it or not it’s about to become a ‘significant time in American history’: Patriots vs. traitors…Start preparing now: food, ammo, fuel…ballots and/or bullets. God knows my heart, and my aim is true.”
Such a message would not be a surprising discovery on extremist platforms like Telegram or Gab, but we are increasingly seeing this violent and apocalyptic rhetoric on Facebook “Patriot” pages, populated largely by…
August 31, 2020 Under the guise of anti-censorship and free speech, video-hosting service BitChute has become a hotbed for violent, conspiratorial and hate-filled video propaganda, and a recruiting ground for extremists.
BitChute founder Ray Vahey’s concept for the platform came from, in his words, “seeing the increased levels of censorship by the large social media platforms in the last couple of years. Bannings, demonetization, and tweaking algorithms to send…
August 20, 2020 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
An FBI Twitter account tweeted out a link to a PDF containing the antisemitic “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” as well as FBI documents related to it, with no other context. President Trump on Wednesday offered encouragement to proponents of QAnon, a viral and dangerous conspiracy theory. According to a new study, Facebook “actively promotes further Holocaust-denial content to that user” and “has been unwilling…
August 14, 2020 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
Israel struck an agreement with the United Arab Emirates to establish “full normalization of relations” even as it forgoes for now plans to annex occupied West Bank territory in order to focus on improving its ties with the rest of the Arab world. Facebook will start banning posts that contain blackface or that promote antisemitic conspiracy theories that Jewish people are running the world. A Georgia congressional candidate, who has a…
August 13, 2020 Extremists are constantly adapting and finding creative ways to reach new audiences – and new ways to evade content moderators. Their latest efforts are evident on TikTok, the Chinese social media app that allows users to create and share short videos. In less than four years, TikTok has racked up more than 800 million users, and its popularity is fast approaching that of social media giants like Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram Each TikTok video has the…
August 07, 2020 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
Twenty state attorneys general called on Facebook to better prevent messages of hate, bias and disinformation from spreading, and said the company needed to provide more help to users facing online abuse. The leader of a white supremacist group was arrested in Weatherford, Texas on Saturday after police said he and two other men placed stickers on county property. And the global Jewish community continues to face rising antisemitism due to the…
August 03, 2020 Facebook Groups play a key role on the Facebook platform. Groups are essentially discussion forums organized around an endless number of possible subjects, allowing individuals to pursue their interests and communicate around shared interests. Groups can be public (posts are visible to all Facebook users) or private (individuals must be approved by the group administrator to join and see the posts).
Despite public announcements of efforts to curb hateful speech and…
July 24, 2020 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
The civil rights groups behind the month-long advertising ad pause of Facebook turned up public pressure with the release of an animated “Dear Mark” video. Almost three years after a conspiracy theory known as QAnon began spreading on dark corners of the internet, Twitter announced that it had removed thousands of accounts linked to the movement. And celebrating the life and legacy of civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis.
Read…
July 13, 2020 What do extremists do when a major social media site starts to deplatform them? While some migrate to less restrictive platforms, others adopt camouflage techniques so they can continue to operate on their platform of choice, hiding in plain sight through name changes and coded phrases.
The new anti-government extremist "boogaloo" movement took the latter approach when, on June 30, Facebook announced it had banned hundreds of groups and pages associated with…
July 10, 2020 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
Civil rights leaders came out of a meeting Tuesday with Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg saying they didn’t make progress on #StopHateforProfit’s demands over how the social media giant polices the platform for hate and misinformation. Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver DeSean Jackson apologized for a series of antisemitic Instagram posts, one of which included a quote about Jews falsely attributed to Adolf Hitler. A county chairman in…
June 22, 2020 Facebook has been claiming that it is effectively addressing hate on its platforms. ADL and others, however, have continued to expose egregious examples of online hate, misinformation and extremism across the company’s products, particularly on Facebook and Instagram. Whether or not these posts technically violate Facebook’s complicated guidelines around hate speech, as a result of the platform’s casual placement of ads, paid advertisements run a risk of being…
June 19, 2020 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
ADL convened a coalition of civil rights groups encouraging corporate advertisers to pull spending from Facebook during the month of July to protest the company’s failure to make its platform a less-hostile place. The Supreme Court ruled that federal civil rights law protects gay, lesbian and transgender workers from discrimination. School textbooks used in institutions controlled by the terror group Hezbollah are teaching children “egregious…
May 08, 2020 THE WEEK’S BIG 3
Antisemitic signs and imagery are seen at anti-quarantine rallies across the country, including in Chicago, where a protester held up a sign with a Nazi slogan that appeared on the gates of Auschwitz. A new report outlines the failures of Steam to adequately address the prevalence of extremists and neo-Nazis on the gaming platform. And in California, a man was seen donning a Ku Klux Klan hood as he shopped for groceries.
Read on for more on these…
May 04, 2020 On March 24, 2020, a white supremacist interrupted a webinar about antisemitism hosted by a Massachusetts Jewish student group by pulling his shirt collar down to reveal a swastika tattoo on his chest. A day later, a similar incident occurred in California when someone disrupted an online class hosted by a JCC (Jewish Community Center); the perpetrator launched into a minutes-long, profanity-laced, antisemitic rant and removed his shirt to display a swastika tattoo on his chest…
April 08, 2020 As more of the world rightfully takes social distancing measures to slow the spread of COVID-19, the audience for the Zoom video conferencing app has expanded tremendously. As with all sudden rapid growth of digital social spaces, this expansion has revealed new platform vulnerabilities and opportunities for bad actors to take advantage of those vulnerabilities. ADL has been tracking the prevalence of “Zoombombing” over the last several weeks -- where bad…