Washington Post, December 3, 2022
"Current and former federal officials are warning that a surge in hate speech and disinformation about Jews on Twitter is uniting and popularizing some of the same extremists who have helped push people to engage in violent protests including the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.
The officials are predicting that Twitter will contribute to more violence in the months ahead, citing the proliferation of extreme content, including support for genocidal Nazis by celebrities with wide followings and the reemergence of QAnon proselytizers and white nationalists.
Since billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk bought Twitter just over a month ago, he has slashed more than half the staff, including most of the people who made judgment calls about what counts as impermissible slurs against religious or ethnic groups.
Musk announced a broad amnesty for most previously banned accounts and has personally interacted with fringe activists and white nationalists on the site in the weeks since he assumed ownership. Other actors have experimented with racist and antisemitic posts to test Musk’s limits as a self-declared “free speech absolutist.”
Even before Musk’s takeover, some Twitter users were encouraging confrontations with transgender people and others who were falsely depicted as “groomers,” or predators who sexually target underage victims. But the new wave of antisemitism has reached millions of people in just days, brought new followers, and helped galvanize a broader coalition of fringe figures.
“This type of escalation and hate and dehumanization, the hatred of the Jewish population — it’s a really directed target. Violence is inevitable,” said Denver Riggleman, a former Air Force intelligence officer who later served as a Republican member of Congress and then on the staff of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday warned that domestic terrorists were maintaining “a visible presence online in attempts to motivate supporters to conduct attacks,” citing increased risks for racial and religious minorities and gays and transgender people, as well as government institutions. “Recent incidents have highlighted the enduring threat to faith-based communities, including the Jewish community,” it said.
The bulletin made clear that online and offline conduct often reinforce each other in a cycle of escalation. The recent shootings at a Colorado gay bar drew praise online, encouraging potential copycat strikes, it said. Likewise, a New Jersey man was arrested last month after publishing an online manifesto for attacks on synagogues, and a second man was caught with a gun after tweeting about plans to “shoot up a synagogue and die.”
“The idea that there is a difference between online chatter and real-word harm is disabused by a decade of research,” said Juliette Kayyem, a security business founder and former assistant DHS secretary. Open expression on Twitter “re-socializes the hate and rids society of the shaming that ought to occur regarding antisemitism,” she said.
Most alarming to Joel Finkelstein, co-founder of the nonprofit Network Contagion Research Institute, has been the unification and elevation of voices little heard since the Capitol attack.
The NCRI has been tracking various indicators that show antisemitism is on the rise, including fast-multiplying Twitter references to the New World Order, a bogus theory that features cosmopolitan elites, sometimes explicitly Jews, wrecking institutions and values in multiple nations to exert more control."
“Kanye is using antisemitism to popularize a list of actors who have been censored for a long time,” Finkelstein said. “Trolls are climbing over the walls to start new accounts. This is a bonanza.”