A new British study has found that an astonishing half million overtly anti-Semitic tweets are sent every year in the UK.
The study, released by the Woolf Institute and referenced in a report by the Community Security Trust and Antisemitism Policy Trust, was compiled from 18 months of research showing that up to 1,350 anti-Semitic tweets were sent every day in the UK, approximately 495,000 annually, the UK Jewish News reported.
Examples given in the report included tweets about the Holocaust and Hitler, anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish owners of soccer teams and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.
“This new report makes it crystal clear that Twitter’s systems for discovering and acting against anti-Jewish racism still aren’t good enough,” Antisemitism Policy Trust CEO Danny Stone told the Jewish News. “As the government considers new internet safety laws, I hope this report will weigh heavily on Minister’s minds.”
Lucy Powell, the Labour MP who is the shadow digital, culture, media and sport secretary, said that the report details the “scale of the challenge” that exists when examining how to combat social media hate.
“Twitter needs to get its house in order without delay, and put the right systems in place upstream so that harm doesn’t occur downstream,” she said.
The Community Security Trust stressed that the report underlines the fact that “social media is the engine of modern anti-Semitism,” and added that an increasing number of reported incidents involve online anti-Semitism.
(Israel National News' North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)