Immediately following “Quds Day” last week, a 1,600% rise in the number of tweets containing the query term “Jerusalem” occurred according to a data analysis conducted by the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM).
“Quds Day” is an annual anti-Israel event — falling on the last Friday of Ramadan — that was originally launched by the Tehran regime in 1979 following the Islamic Revolution in Iran. “Quds Day” demonstrations around the world have often featured expressions of blatant antisemitism, as well as violent incitement against Jews and calls for the elimination of the State of Israel.
Many of 49,789 “hits” for the term “Jerusalem” promoted revisionist narratives about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that deny the historical ties of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and portrayed Israeli Jews as “colonialists” or “imperialists.”
These slanderous online posts promote discourse that fuels real-world antisemitic behavior, as seen last week in Toronto, London, Tehran, and Karachi, as well as other cities across the globe.
The most popular words in tweets using the term “Jerusalem” from April 7-17 can be viewed here:
Three examples of the sampled tweets follow:
@SamarDJarrah (174.9 K followers)
@Spriter99880 (108.6 K followers)
@HadiNasrallah (70.1 K followers)
While dangerous forms of antisemitism are proliferating on other social media platforms as well, the CAM Antisemitism Research Center is currently analyzing data from only Twitter, Reddit, and 4Chan.
At a time when Jews are facing rising threats around the world, social media platforms must do more to monitor and remove antisemitic materials.
