Twitter, the proverbial bridge under which trolls can spawn and spew, has been a particular hotbed for anti-Semitism, so much so that the nonprofit Anti-Defamation League Task Force on Harassment and Journalism has released a report quantifying anti-Jewish hate speech. A keyword study looking at Tweets from August 2015 to July 2016 and searching for anti-Semitic terms like holocaust, kike, etc., yielded 2.6 million results.
Reviewing the study, the New York Times points out that 19,253 tweets were directed at journalists. More than two-thirds of the tweets directed at these journalists were sent by just 1,600 Twitter accounts (of 313 million Twitter accounts that have been created).
The words that appear with the most frequency in the bios of these accounts are “Trump,” “nationalist,” “conservative,” and “white.” Here the ADL feels the need to clarify that "this does not imply that the Trump campaign supported or endorsed the anti-Semitic tweets, only that certain self-styled supporters sent these ugly messages."
“The spike in hate we've seen online this election cycle is extremely troubling and unlike anything we have seen in modern politics. A half century ago, the KKK burned crosses. Today, extremists are burning up Twitter,” Jonathan A. Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a release. “We are concerned about the impact of this hate on the ability of journalists to do their job and on free speech, which is why we established this Task Force."
Another election tie-in: According to the report, "Seventy-six percent of tweets at journalists were posted between February to July 2016. This corresponds with intensifying coverage of the presidential campaign, the candidates, and their positions on a range of issues."
Anything you can do about this, @support?
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