I CARE - - Online anti-Semitism: Difficult to Fight, but Even Harder to Quantify

11.6.16

I CARE - - News - Internet Centre Anti Racism Europe: 7/6/2016- Julia Ioffe, a Jewish journalist, becomes the target of anti-Semitic attacks, and even death threats, from Donald Trump supporters on social media after she publishes a profile of his wife Melania.
Jonathan Weisman, a Jewish editor at The New York Times, finds himself inundated with anti-Semitic epithets from self-identified supporters of the presumptive Republican presidential candidate after the editor tweets an essay on fascist trends in the United States.
Erin Schrode, a young Jewish Democrat running for Congress in California, receives a torrent of Jew-hating messages on Facebook (“Fire up the ovens” was just one of the gems) in what appears to be an orchestrated attack launched by American neo-Nazis.
A Google Chrome extension (removed a day after it was discovered) marks members of the Jewish faith online by placing three sets of parentheses around their names.

Mere coincidence, or is this the dawn of a new and dangerous era in online anti-Semitism? The honest answer, say those in the business of tracking attacks on Jews, is that it’s hard to tell. In the old offline world, life was far less complicated. You counted acts of vandalism, physical assaults and whatever else was quantifiable, compared the total with the previous year, and then determined whether things were getting better or worse for the Jews. With the advent of social media, however, those sorts of calculations have become virtually impossible. Not only is it difficult to know what to count (Tweets? Retweets? Likes? Posts? Shares? Follows? Reports of abuse?), but also, with billions of people posting online, how do you begin searching?