The “horrible, vicious antisemitic terror attack … acted as a catalyst for an outpouring of Jew hatred across the world,” she added.
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CyberWell uses artificial intelligence to analyze thousands of posts in real-time and flag content that has a “high probability” of being anti-Semitic. The nonprofit recorded an 86% increase in this type of content after Oct. 7, according to a recent report. Facebook saw a 193% increase, however, Montemayor said X had a top “benchmark” of anti-Semitic content before the terrorist attacks.
Across the board, the outpouring of anti-Jewish hatred and graphic violence after Hamas’ attack caught social media platforms off guard, Montemayor told Fox News. Livestreams showed Hamas kidnapping and executing families, videos circulated of women “being paraded in the streets in Gaza after being violently raped” and “live lynchings of Israeli soldiers” were posted on TikTok, she said.
“The mental war with social media continues to this day,” Montemayor added, with Hamas “spreading photographs of hostages making statements under duress and then turning up their bodies or even torture videos. “
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Online anti-Semitism is lately the most widespread Montemayor has experienced in his career. The closest precedent came in October 2022, he said, after Kanye West made hostile comments about Jewish people.
“Every time there’s been a standoff in the Middle East, we’ve noticed an accumulation of anti-Semitic rhetoric and counter-narrative,” said Adrian Moore, vice president for policy at the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank.
Companies don’t have a legal or ethical responsibility to censor speech on their platforms, Moore said, but it’s under pressure for them to compete for customers, so maximum offensive content could redound to their maximum productive interest.
“These companies have a legal responsibility to offer a position where other people need to be,” he said. “So I think the defense that we oppose to offensive speech online is a combination of those companies that can’t provide a decent position for other people to exchange ideas and information. “
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Virtual poison “absolutely” correlates with an increased threat of genuine crime, Montemayor said, both in the U. S. and around the world.
“You see the intersection of anti-Semitism and radical ideology, radical Islamic ideology and pro-terrorist content online that surely poses a challenge to any Western democracy, including the United States of America,” Montemayor said.
Antisemitic incidents surged more than 300% in the month following Hamas’ attack on Israel, a recent Anti-Defamation League survey found. A separate ADL survey found 70% of participants had been exposed to “misinformation or hate” related to the conflict.
“We advise corporations to proactively create more extensive and better-resourced content moderation crisis rules, adding by expanding the number of moderators and experts with similar cultural and thematic expertise to the existing crisis,” ADL spokesman Kevin Altman told Fox News.
CyberWell began tracking anti-Semitic speech online in English and Arabic in 2022. After the Hamas attack in October, Montemayor said the nature of the hatred was “much more violent. “
An investigation of Arabic-language content showed that 62% of the messages called for “harming or killing Jews,” he said. “We have just noticed an inability to properly manage this wave of hate speech and pro-terrorist content specifically in Arabic. “
Social media corporations have long struggled with a lack of moderators in languages other than English. Facebook engineers revealed in a 2020 memo that 60% of Arabic content went unnoticed, POLITICO reported in the past.
Arabic content on X and other platforms also went unchecked.
Montemayor gave social media corporations a “big F” for their content moderation after Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, but claimed that many platforms were running his company with content that CyberWell considers anti-Semitic. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters)
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But beyond that, debates have focused more on harm to Arabic speakers than on anti-Semitic Arabic content.
A report commissioned through Meta concluded that Facebook accidentally violated Palestinian users’ freedom of speech during the 2021 Gaza war, which began after Hamas introduced rockets into Israel. According to the report, Facebook excessively enforced regulations when it came to Arabic-language posts. and poorly applied Hebrew content.
Meta also apologized after banning the Instagram hashtag #AlAqsa, which referred to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City. The company’s algorithms had the Islamic holy site for the terrorist group Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.
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While Montemayor awarded social media platforms across the world a “big fat F” for content moderation in the wake of Oct. 7, she added that her nonprofit has a good working relationship with Facebook, Instagram and TikTok and has seen a more than 90% removal rate for content CyberWell flagged.
X’s removal rate is only 10%, but she’s hopeful CyberWell will be able to “work with that platform to get those numbers up.”
To hear more from Montemayor, click here.
Ramiro Vargas contributed to the accompanying video.
Hannah Ray Lambert is a producer and writer for Fox News Digital Originals.