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  • 14 minutes ago
Inside the subtle strategy designed to sneak radical ideologies directly into the social media feeds of young audiences.
Transcript
00:00What do these emojis have in common?
00:04Individually, these are normal, everyday, unremarkable emojis,
00:07but they can all be interpreted in an anti-Semitic way.
00:12On social media, they are used to spread anti-Semitic hate.
00:16The juice box is a crude phonetic play on words,
00:20exploiting the similarity between the words juice and Jews.
00:24The octopus is a modern spin on a decades-old conspiracy theory.
00:28The false claim that Jews secretly control global finance, politics, and the media.
00:34But emojis are just the tip of the iceberg.
00:37There are memes, there are slogans, catchphrases, and now even sounds.
00:42And these particular elements, these forms, are now interacting with each other.
00:47One example, 271K, or 271, refers to a debunked conspiracy theory
00:55claiming that the Nazis did not kill more than 6 million Jews,
00:59but rather only 271,301.
01:04The theory cites incomplete documents and has been proven wrong.
01:09Then there is coded language.
01:11For example, around the word noticing.
01:14It's used in hashtags and captions to signal
01:17that the user has supposedly woken up to a fictional Jewish conspiracy.
01:23And then there are the memes.
01:25Infamous hate symbols like the happy merchant cartoon
01:28are constantly remixed into mainstream internet trends,
01:32keeping them hidden in plain sight.
01:34This helps you avoid reprisals
01:36and also makes it harder for the moderators to intervene.
01:39So you also use this ambiguity
01:41to avoid certain repercussions or consequences for yourself.
01:46The problem?
01:47Mainstream apps have rules against hate speech.
01:50But AI content filters struggle to catch the interplay of coded text,
01:55music, and imagery
01:56because their true meaning is only revealed in context.
02:00Wynn Brodersen and his co-authors from IDZ Jena
02:04call the phenomenon anti-Semitism in small doses.
02:08By breaking anti-Semitic messages into seemingly harmless fragments,
02:13extremist content can appear more acceptable
02:15and less recognizable as hate speech.
02:19I would also say that it's about the question of belonging.
02:22You have to have a certain level of reading proficiency
02:25and then you belong to a certain group.
02:28And of course that gives you a sense of superiority
02:30knowing that you possess this ability to interpret.
02:34If you want to help battle this form of anti-Semitic hate,
02:38don't interact, report it to the platform
02:41and to dedicated watchdog organizations.
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