H eadlines
Crackdown Continued from Page 1
literally find what was previously
unspeakable. Social media has
become a breeding ground for
bigotry.” Following the Jan. 6 Capitol
riots, which left five people dead,
the social media giants took
serious steps against accounts
they deemed
potentially dangerous. Twitter suspended
more than 70,000 accounts
linked to the QAnon conspiracy
theory, whose followers believe
Donald Trump is secretly saving
the world from a cabal of Satanic
pedophiles and cannibals, and
who traffic in anti-Semitic
tropes. Adherents of QAnon
were numerous among the mob
that stormed the Capitol.

Trump was permanently
suspended from Twitter “due to
the risk of further incitement of
violence,” Twitter announced.

Other platforms, including
Facebook and Instagram, also
suspended Trump’s accounts,
as well as the accounts of some
of his associates.

In the wake of the suspen-
sions, many far-right voices
moved to the platform Parler
until Apple, Google and
Amazon removed Parler from
their platforms too.

Shutting down social media
12 JANUARY 21, 2021
accounts and sites, though,
does not necessarily halt the
spread of violent rhetoric,
anti-Semitism or other hateful
ideologies, according to some
law enforcement experts.

“When you limit these
types of accounts, what
happens is the folks who are
using these various platforms
to communicate will simply
jump to another platform,”
said Shawn Brokos, director
of community security for the
Jewish Federation of Greater
Pittsburgh. “We see that all the
time in law enforcement.” She
analogized tracking extremists
to a game of “whack-a-mole.”
Kathleen Blee, a professor
of sociology at the University
of Pittsburgh who has
researched white supremacy
and is a member of one the
three congregations attacked
during the shooting at the Tree
of Life building, agreed there
are “downsides” to moving
people off of sites where people
understand that they are being
monitored, which can have
some moderating effect.

“It’s moving people into
these end-to-end encrypted —
and really the cesspool of the
internet —sites that are just
vehicles for the most horrific
white supremacist, violent,
anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant
views,” Blee said. “So, that’s a
problem, obviously. And it’s
hard to monitor what individ-
uals are doing on them — it’s
not hard to monitor them in the
aggregate, but it is hard to pin
anything to an individual user.”
As of last week, use of apps
favored by extremists had
skyrocketed, Blee said. Users
on Signal had increased 677%
and Telegram was up 146%.

“That’s a problem,” Blee said.

“These places are slippery. And
Telegram and Signal are very
much open to hosting these
kinds of very violent white
supremacist conversations.”
On the other hand, Blee
said, when more open sites
close down, there is usually
some attrition.

“For one thing, some people
will not want to gravitate from the
level of what was being expressed
on Facebook or even Parler, to
the next step toward violence,”
she said. “And you are also going
to lose some people because, as
you get into some of these, they
become more and more diffi-
cult to access and require more
technological knowledge.”
Another downside to moving
users off mainstream platforms
is that it reifies some of their
false beliefs. “For these racially
motivated violent extremists,
there is this inherent belief
that there is a Zionist govern-
ment that is trying to control
everybody and that the Jews are
behind a lot of that,” Brokos said.

In fact, that ideology may
have motivated the Pittsburgh
synagogue shooter.

“What seems to have happened
with him very much fits the
pattern we see in other kinds of
racially motivated violence,” said
Blee. “First, there’s a sense of some
enormous existential threat out
there. If you think of the 1980s
and ’90s, when the white suprem-
acists became significant in this
country, the existential threat
was banking and farm foreclo-
sures — it was the beginning of
the militia movement and really
the resurgence of anti-Semitism
in a very public way. That was
the existential threat: Jews held
JEWISH EXPONENT
Twitter suspended the account of President Donald Trump, which he had
previously used for most of his communication. 
Screenshot via PJC
a stranglehold over the economy
and were ruining the lives of white
farmers was kind of the message
there.” These days, the existential
threat is more commonly framed
as white genocide or “the Great
Replacement Theory — that
whites will become the minority
and lose power,” Blee said.

The next precursor to
racially motivated violence is
identifying a person or group
responsible, she continued.

“In the Pittsburgh shooting,
the threat was white genocide
and the target was George
Soros — so there you have an
amplification by politicians of
the same message that’s being
spread on Gab and by other
white supremacists online.”
To white supremacists,
“George Soros” signifies “Jews,”
Blee said, “and they all understand
that. George Soros is to white
supremacists what Rothschild was
a couple decades ago. Probably
most of these people couldn’t tell
you who George Soros is — just
an image that stands in for Jews
writ large, Jewish control.”
After identifying the threat
and the target, the third stage is
a “sense of urgency,” Blee said.

“That’s the final trigger.

‘You can’t just wait around
and mobilize yourself for the
threat, you have to act now’
— that’s the message …. It’s
pernicious in any form. When
it’s happening on the internet
all over the place, when it’s
amplified in public, when
there is an echoing of what’s
happening on places like Gab
and what’s showing on TV,
that’s particularly dangerous.”
Shutting down Trump’s
use of social media “as a
megaphone” in the days after
the Jan. 6 riots and before the
inauguration was particularly
important, Blee said: “I think
in the short run, that outweighs
everything — he was clearly
providing an accelerant to these
conversations and actions.”
The Anti-Defamation
League also condoned Trump’s
ban from social media, calling
it an “excellent step.”
“President Trump incited
the violent riots at the Capitol
using social media and he paid
the price,” said Shira Goodman,
regional director of ADL
Philadelphia. “The big platforms
must enforce their terms of service
and demonstrate moral leader-
ship. Individuals who seek to
spread fraudulent and completely
debunked claims to undermine
our democracy and encourage
mobs to overturn an election and
storm the Capitol have no right to
do so on social platforms.

“And social platforms not only
have no obligation ethically or
legally to host and amplify those
voices,” she added. “They have a
moral and ethical and, in some
cases, a legal obligation to stop
such incitement to violence.

While ADL believes that everyone
should have the right to express
themselves, incitement to violence
is not a protected right.” l
Toby Tabachnick is the editor of
the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, an
Exponent-affiliated publication.

JEWISHEXPONENT.COM