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
Exclusive Women’s Apparel Boutique
Made in USA
Custom designs, color options and
free alterations available
Evening Gowns
Suits/Separates Cocktail Dresses
61 Buck Road
Huntingdon Valley,
PA 19006
www.elanaboutique.com (215)953-8820
Make an appointment today!
Consult with the designer to
explore your style options.

JEWISHEXPONENT.COM 11