Musk-owned Twitter now hosts two thirds of online Jew hate
Community Security Trust's latest half-yearly figures show a slight drop overall but incidents involving tweets and children are on the up
The charity charged with protecting Britain’s Jews from antisemitism has reported an increase of Jew-hate on Twitter and an upward trend of school-sector incidents.
In the latest half-yearly figures from the Community Security Trust (CST), published on Thursday, there was a slight overall reduction in the number of times people targeted Jews from January to June of this year, but with specific pockets of concern.
Incidents of antisemitism on Twitter – the social media platform recently bought by Elon Musk and rebranded as ‘X’ – now make up almost two thirds of CST’s online incidents, the charity said, compared to just less than half a year ago.
Following the company’s $44 billion purchase by Musk – a free speech champion – the platform’s policy is now to remove fewer pieces of harmful content and instead to restrict their visibility and reach.
“The data in our report suggest that their new approach to limiting the visibility of antisemitic tweets is not working,” said a charity spokesman.
“The incidents reported to CST also indicate that antisemitic content on Twitter is more likely to include extremist discourse and ideology, or conspiracy theories and stereotypes about Jews, than the antisemitism found on other platforms.”
CST chief executive Mark Gardner said Musk’s values and approach were not just philosophical – they directly affected Jews. “It shows the importance of the tone and policies that are set by leaders and influencers,” he said.
“We experienced it in every year of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, and now, from a totally different direction, we see the exact same thing happening because of recent changes at Twitter.”
Elsewhere, the CST said it was worried that “the proportion of antisemitic incidents involving minors, either as perpetrators, victims, or both, has risen for the third year in a row”, with anti-Jewish incidents affecting the school sector increasing by almost a third in the first half of this year.
Where the charity was able to register a description of the offender, around a quarter recorded someone younger than 18 years, representing the highest proportion of child offenders for almost a decade.
Likewise, children were amongst the victims in 26 percent of incidents. “This phenomenon has also been on the rise since the first half of 2020, when the victims were children in just nine percent of incidents,” said the CST.
In total there were 803 incidents of antisemitism across the first half of 2023, the lowest January-June figures since 2017, but Lord Mann, the government’s independent adviser on antisemitism, warned that “anyone who thinks the issue has gone away needs to read this report”.
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