Speaking at the Jerusalem Post Second Front Conference, Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, founder and CEO of CyberWell, stated that since the Hamas attack on October 7, online antisemitism has surged by 86%, adding that one of the largest increases has been on Facebook, which recorded a 193% increase in content deemed likely to be antisemitic.
“There is a clear surge not only in online antisemitism but in calls to violence against Jews – specifically in Arabic, where there was an increase from a very small percentage to over 26% of the data: clear outward violence and justifying the killing of Jews online,” she said in her interview with Tamar Uriel-Beeri, managing editor of Jpost.com.
The data is taken from a report prepared by Cyberwell, which is the first open database of online antisemitism using open-source intelligence techniques to track online antisemitism in real-time across the major social media platforms.
Social media unprepared
Cohen Montemayor stated that the social media platforms were unprepared for Hamas’s hijacking of social media for use as psychological warfare against Israel.
“Hamas extrapolated on the ISIS tactic of using digital to video," she said. "There was a live stream of the kidnapping and murder of a family on Facebook, videos of women being dragged through the streets of Gaza after being raped, a live lynching that was posted on Twitter – these are things that are extremely violent but really should give us pause.
"They are national security issues. Other terror organizations saw what Hamas did, in abusing the lack of readiness on the social media platforms to automatically remove this content, and now are abusing it as well.”
Since its launch in May 2022, CyberWell has been working with content moderation teams and policy teams at Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to drive enforcement of improvement of their digital policies. Cohen Montemayor cautioned viewers to always verify any information posted on social media via other news sources, pointing out that all social media platforms create an echo chamber of reinforced bias.