RELIGIONS NEWS AGENCY(REDNA) – Fueled by the conflict between Israel and Gaza and stoked by extremists, hate speech has spiked on social media platforms such as X, Facebook and Instagram, researchers said.
Antisemitic and Islamophobic hate speech has soared on social media platforms since the war broke out between Hamas and Israel.Credit…Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Sheera Frenkel and Steven Lee Myers reviewed thousands of social media posts with antisemitic and Islamophobic hashtags.
On Oct. 7, the day Hamas attacked Israel, the hashtag #HitlerWasRight appeared on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Over the next month, more than 46,000 posts featured the hashtag, often alongside language that called for violence against Jews.
At the same time, the hashtag #DeathtoMuslims also spiked on X and was shared tens of thousands of times, according to a review by The New York Times.
Antisemitic and Islamophobic hate speech has surged across the internet since the conflict between Israel and Hamas broke out. The increases have been at far greater levels than what academics and researchers who monitor social media say they have seen before, with millions of often explicitly violent posts on X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.