|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Following the previous day’s massacre at a public Hanukkah celebration in Bondi Beach, Australia, the Antisemitism Research Center (ARC) by CAM conducted snapshot investigation on Monday of conspiracy theories being spread online about the attack.
At approximately 3:00 PM ET on Monday, ARC researchers documented and analyzed the first 30 English-language posts produced by searching “Mossad” — the name of Israel’s national intelligence agency — in the platform’s search function.
The ARC found that 15 of the posts, or 50 percent, propagated the false claim that Israeli agents manipulatively orchestrated the Bondi Beach attack as a “false flag” event to garner support and defame Muslims.
The results, while based on only a small sample, are indicative of a long-existing social media trend that denies Jewish victimhood and blames the Jewish people and state blamed for atrocities they suffer. The phenomenon is rooted in classical tropes positing malign Jewish control of global affairs — an outlandish and baseless notion that has fueled antisemitic hatred for thousands of years, endangering Jewish communities worldwide.
Just in the past seven months, the aftermaths of terror attacks targeting Jews in Manchester, England, Boulder, Colorado, and Washington, D.C., all saw a proliferation of online allegations of Israeli culpability — as was the case following the October 7th attacks in Israel in 2023.
Antisemitic influencers have also advanced baseless theories that Israel assassinated American political activist and media personality Charlie Kirk in September, and, going back further, still enthusiastically circulate ludicrous accusations of Mossad involvement in the 9/11 attacks on the United States, two and a half decades later.
As part of its investigation, the ARC utilized new X transparency features to map the countries where conspiracy-promoting accounts are located. The geographical origins of the 15 posts in question spanned at least eight countries (X did not provide location information for one of the posts).
The graph below shows the number of unique accounts that disseminated Mossad-focused conspiracy theories about the Bondi Beach massacre per country.
The broad geographical distribution of the 15 posts underscores the elusive nature of online antisemitism and the ease with which toxic content crosses international borders.
In the social media era, hate can spread to millions with the mere click of a button, and incite real-life acts of violence, as was tragically seen in Australia on Sunday.
Social media companies must take responsibility and vigorously enforce anti-hate speech policies with stricter monitoring and enforcement efforts to ensure their platforms do not serve as breeding grounds for would-be terrorists.
Several examples documented by the ARC in its investigation can be seen below:
