Recent Study Looks at Anti-Semitism in Online Communities, Memes

Two of the largest alt-right web communities displayed an explosive growth in anti-Semitic and racist rhetoric over the course of 18 months beginning in 2016, according to a University of Alabama at Birmingham study. The study, A Quantitative Approach to Understanding Online Antisemitism, discusses how the anti-Semitism trend in alt-right communities influenced web communities in mainstream ecosystems like Twitter and Reddit, which began as early as the months preceding the 2016 election.

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Princeton University, the Cyprus University of Technology, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the Network Contagion Research Institute conducted the first large-scale quantitative analysis on the rise of online anti-Semitism­ and how anti-Semitic content flows across mainstream and fringe web communities. The study looked at Politically Incorrect (/pol/), a subcommunity in 4chan that offers an image-based discussion forum where users are anonymous, and Gab.ai, an alt-right Twitter clone. Read the full article here. 

Jeremy Blackburn, Ph.D., assistant professor in the UAB Department of Computer Science, is available for comment on this study. 

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Contact: Alicia Rohan, [email protected], 205-603-7027