nation
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt speaks at the group’s 2018 National Leadership
Summit in Washington, D.C.

Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
ADL Develops Algorithm to Track
Antisemitism on Social Media
BY ASAF SHALEV | JTA.ORG
W hen it comes to antisemi-
tism on social media, the
algorithms governing the
major platforms shoulder some of the
blame for their reach. But the Anti-
Defamation League hopes to fi ght the
spread — by creating an algorithm of
its own.

The Jewish civil rights group
announced on March 8 that it has built
a system called the Online Hate Index,
describing it as the fi rst tool ever devel-
oped to measure antisemitism on social
media platforms. Th e program can sift
through millions of posts quickly to
detect antisemitic comments and aid in
10 their removal.

Th is system uses an algorithm
informed by artifi cial intelligence
to fi nd and classify posts as possi-
bly antisemitic. Th ose posts are then
fed to a team of both volunteers and
experts, who use their judgment to
make the fi nal call. Th e system also
tracks whether the posts are eventually
taken down.

Th e Online Hate Index was needed
because social media companies are
not being transparent enough about
their eff orts to curb the spread of hate
speech on their platforms, according to
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, whose
organization has been pressing the big
tech companies on the issue for years.

“We will use this tool to hold social
MARCH 17, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
media platforms accountable for how
well they proactively take down hate
and how well their content moderators
respond to reports,” Greenblatt said in
a statement.

One of the project’s goals is to
demonstrate that if the ADL has devel-
oped the technology to track antisem-
itism, surely Silicon Valley can do so
as well — and can therefore be doing
more to address the issue.

Social media companies have
attempted to tackle antisemitism in the
past, but their track record is mixed at
best. Facebook (now known as Meta)
has stumbled following its decision to
ban Holocaust denial on its platforms;
engineers developed screens that also
sometimes blocked legitimate educa-
tional posts meant to spread awareness
about the Holocaust.

For its fi rst analysis, the ADL used
its system to scrutinize Reddit and
Twitter, collecting posts from one week
in August of last year. Th e ADL chose
these platforms because they are the
only major ones that provide open
access to their data. Facebook, by con-
trast, does not typically allow outside
groups to tap in for research.

Th e algorithm used by the ADL was
trained to spot instances of possible
antisemitism. In a process known as
machine learning, human beings had
labeled comments as antisemitic and
fed them to the algorithm, which in
turn began recognizing patterns. Th e
more comments the algorithm pro-



cessed, the better it became at catching
the antisemitic ones.

Antisemitic statements like “Jews
are lizard people prove me wrong”
and “Jew mind control magic” were
among the roughly 2,000 Reddit posts
pinpointed by the ADL system, out of
some 40 million total comments added
to Reddit during that week.

The number of people who view a
comment on Reddit is in part deter-
mined by whether users “upvote” or
“downvote” it — and there’s some good
news in this regard. Users are on aver-
age scoring antisemitic comments a
third lower than other types of posts,
according to a report ADL published
about its analysis.

members holding a wide variety of
views on the question. One particu-
larly contentious issue is deciding when
criticism of Israel crosses the line into
antisemitism. The ADL report says that its algo-
rithm is trained by in-house experts
and volunteers from the Jewish com-
munity. That doesn’t mean human
judgment is entirely outsourced to
computers. In the ADL’s system, arti-
ficial intelligence is simply used to sift
through masses of content, with its
human teams ultimately determining
which posts constitute antisemitism.

To aid them in their decisions, each
volunteer gets a primer that’s also
available on the ADL website. That
The ADL report says that its algorithm
is trained by in-house experts and
volunteers from the Jewish
community. That doesn’t mean
human judgment is entirely
outsourced to computers.

“Statistical analysis of those scores
shows that antisemitic content on
Reddit is rewarded significantly less
than non-antisemitic content,” the
report said.

For Twitter, which provides only a
limited snapshot of its data, the ADL
estimated there were some 27,400
antisemitic tweets among the 440 mil-
lion posted during the week its soft-
ware examined, and that these tweets
could have been viewed by as many as
130 million people.

The ADL cautioned that it designed
its dragnet to be conservative and that
it looked only at English-language text,
meaning that video, audio and images
were excluded, as well as anything
written in a foreign language.

On both platforms, most of the
antisemitic comments stayed up for
months after being posted and were not
removed even after the ADL alerted the
platforms about them.

One of the challenges for any attempt
to stamp out antisemitic speech is
defining the term, with scholars and
primer includes a reference to the defi-
nition of antisemitism drafted by the
International Holocaust Remembrance
Alliance, which has proven controver-
sial because it focuses on anti-Israel
speech. Some examples in the primer of state-
ments that can be considered antisemitic
include “claiming that the existence of a
State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and
“denying the Jewish people their right
to self-determination.”
Critics say that the IHRA definition
is improper because it has the potential
to delegitimize pro-Palestinian activ-
ism if adopted by universities and gov-
ernmental bodies. Supporters, on the
other hand, say that any discussion of
antisemitism today must contend with
attacks on Israel.

In a post on its website predating
the introduction of its software tool,
the ADL rejects the idea that adopting
the definition could prohibit criticism
of Israel, arguing that expressing such
criticism is protected under the U.S
Constitution. JE
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