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Social Media Algorithms and Design Spread Antisemitism — Not Foreign Actors
A 3D-printed miniature model of Elon Musk and the X logo are seen in this illustration taken Jan. 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
Recently, as Jewish Insider reported, bipartisan lawmakers in Congress hailed what they saw as a major advance in fighting online antisemitism — X’s new location feature.
The new tool, showing which country an account operates from — had started revealing that some accounts spreading antisemitic content in US political discussions were based overseas. For legislators on both sides, this represented a digital unmasking.
Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) remarked that the feature exposed “foreign interests trying to spread antisemitic poison” while “masquerading as Americans.”
Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) insisted Americans “deserve to know which accounts are run from abroad, so we know the true source of these narratives.” Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) took a geopolitical view: “Beijing, Moscow and Tehran know they cannot defeat us economically or militarily, so they exploit controversial issues, like Israel and antisemitism, and try to divide.” Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley declared the feature “a huge win for transparency and American security.”
The story is appealing: foreign enemies weaponize antisemitism to fracture American unity, and transparency about account origins helps us counter these external threats. There’s truth here — bad actors do exploit divisive topics.
But this celebration reveals a dangerous misdiagnosis.
As the lead of the Decoding Antisemitism project — which has examined over 300,000 items of digital content across multiple crises — I’ve identified three distinct but connected drivers of online antisemitic radicalization: coordinated malicious actors (foreign and domestic), algorithmic amplification through platform design, and homegrown participatory dynamics enabled by online communication itself — anonymity, mutual reinforcement, and the normalization of extremism through constant exposure.
The issue isn’t that foreign influence exists — it does. The problem is treating it as the primary driver while overlooking the structural and domestic conditions that allow antisemitic narratives to take root and spread.
How we diagnose problems determines how we design solutions — and misdiagnosis doesn’t just limit our response, it actively redirects resources, attention, and political will away from factors we can actually control.
Comprehending online antisemitism demands a virological approach: examining not just where accounts originate, but how hate narratives evolve, which platform features enable transmission, and what conditions allow them to thrive. Yet social media platforms remain essentially black boxes — we lack systematic tools to understand dynamics unfolding within these digital spaces.
Lawmakers celebrate a feature revealing account geography while leaving the actual black box — algorithmic recommendations, engagement optimization, and content amplification — completely unexamined.
The Conflation Problem
The Jewish Insider article and quoted lawmakers collapse “foreign,” “adversarial,” and “antisemitic” into one category. This conflation obscures more than it reveals.
It treats geographic origin as definitive of intent and impact. An account in South Asia or Eastern Europe engaging with US politics isn’t necessarily a state-directed operation. It may simply be someone with opinions about American affairs. Account location reveals nothing about whether content is coordinated, conspiratorial, state-driven, or simply individual opinion.
More crucially, emphasizing foreign accounts distracts from what we know empirically about domestic antisemitic content production.
Following the October 7 attacks, antisemitic discourse surged to 36-38% of comments on major UK news outlet YouTube channels — nearly double the pre-crisis baseline. After the Washington museum shooting in May 2025, antisemitic content averaged 43% across major English-language news channels, with some reaching 66%.
These aren’t fringe platforms infiltrated by foreign bots — they’re mainstream digital spaces where domestic audiences actively produce and amplify antisemitic narratives.
Research on antisemitic discourse spread reveals a three-phase domestic process: elite figures make strategically ambiguous statements, digital intermediaries (podcasters, YouTubers, influencers) reframe and sharpen this messaging, and comment sections collapse ambiguity into explicit hate speech.
This “cascading radicalization” is primarily homegrown, driven by domestic actors and platform dynamics — not solely foreign infiltration.
Our analysis cannot definitively establish every anonymous commenter’s geographic origin. What we observe are linguistic and cultural markers — idiom, references, political framings — indicating domestic participation, combined with the absence of coordination patterns typical of bot networks. The antisemitic discourse we documented emerges through “dialogical warfare”: organic exchanges between users presenting as ordinary Americans who deploy antisemitism as an explanatory framework for complex issues.
When a US Congressmember amplifies antisemitic tropes, when popular podcasts platform guests trafficking in conspiracy theories about Jewish power, when partisan media deploy dual loyalty accusations — these aren’t foreign operations. They’re homegrown productions embedded in American political discourse and amplified through domestic networks.
The Missing Architecture
Most striking about celebrating X’s location feature is what remains unexamined: the platform itself.
There’s virtually no discussion about platform design, algorithmic amplification, recommendation systems, the attention economy, or structural dynamics allowing hateful content to scale. The feature is treated as inherently truth-revealing, exposing hidden foreign manipulation.
But this framing evades more important questions: why do certain narratives spread, how do platform architectures enable amplification, and how do online communication conditions — anonymity, mutual reinforcement, constant exposure to extremity — create environments where antisemitic ideas mutate and take hold?
The answer has little to do with account location and everything to do with how platforms are built. Engagement-based algorithms reward emotionally provocative content — outrage, fear, tribal solidarity. Recommendation systems create filter bubbles and radicalization pathways. Virality architecture privileges simplification, moral clarity, and villain identification. The attention economy systematically rewards polarizing, enraging content. These are design choices, not inevitable features.
Meanwhile, online communication conditions themselves — anonymity removing social accountability, mutual confirmation among like-minded voices, omnipresent hate speech normalizing extremity — create participatory environments where ordinary users become active radicalization contributors.
Contemporary antisemitism increasingly operates through coded expressions, memes, and multimodal signals evading simple keyword detection. The watermelon emoji, the paraglider symbol — these function as in-group markers regardless of geographic location. Strategic ambiguity, not foreign origin, enables antisemitic narratives to spread while maintaining plausible deniability.
The Political Convenience
The “foreign adversaries spreading antisemitism” narrative aligns with a bipartisan preference: attributing social breakdown to hostile external actors. This framing is politically convenient across the spectrum.
For Republicans, it allows condemning antisemitism without confronting how right-wing media has mainstreamed antisemitic conspiracy theories — “great replacement” narratives, George Soros accusations, “globalist” rhetoric. For Democrats, it enables criticizing online hate without reckoning with how segments of progressive activism have normalized anti-Zionist rhetoric often sliding into antisemitic tropes about Jewish power and loyalty.
The foreign influence frame permits symbolic accountability –the appearance of action without institutional change. Lawmakers can call for location transparency, celebrate platform implementations, and position themselves as defenders against external threats. What they needn’t do is examine how American political rhetoric contributes to normalizing antisemitism, push for regulatory interventions altering platform incentives, or confront how online communication creates radicalization pathways.
This isn’t analytical sloppiness. It’s moral abdication.
What Accountability Would Actually Require
Genuine accountability for online antisemitism requires confronting all three drivers — not just one.
First, acknowledging that while malicious actors (foreign and domestic) exploit divisive issues, they operate within a larger ecosystem. We must recognize the United States as an active site where antisemitic ideas are produced, circulated, and normalized through domestic political culture, media ecosystems, and participatory online dynamics — not merely as an innocent target.
Second, confronting how platform architecture shapes what spreads, and demanding transparency not just about account locations but about algorithmic recommendations, content moderation, the attention economy’s incentives, and metrics driving platform design.
Third, recognizing that high-profile domestic actors — politicians, media figures, influencers with millions of followers — bear far more responsibility for mainstreaming antisemitic narratives than anonymous accounts. We must understand the three-phase process through which elite ambiguity cascades into radicalized discourse.
Fourth, examining how partisan political discourse traffics in antisemitic tropes through strategic ambiguity — and being willing to call this out when politically inconvenient.
Fifth, acknowledging online communication conditions themselves — anonymity, mutual reinforcement, constant exposure to extremity — are creating environments where ordinary users become radicalization participants.
X’s location feature may provide useful information about one factor among many. But treating this as revelatory, exposing the “true source” of antisemitic narratives, is a dangerous misdiagnosis.
If democracies want to confront antisemitism seriously, they must address all three drivers: monitor and counter malicious actors where they exist, examine platform architectures amplifying hate, and confront participatory dynamics and communication conditions enabling antisemitic narratives to flourish in mainstream spaces.
How we diagnose problems shapes how we conceptualize solutions. Focusing exclusively on foreign actors may be politically convenient. It will not protect the public sphere.
Dr. Matthias J. Becker is the AddressHate Research Scholar at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Cambridge, and Lead of the “Decoding Antisemitism” project, which analyzes how antisemitic ideas spread and mutate in digital communication.
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Why the Forward has launched a Yiddish podcast
In April 2022, right after the COVID virus sequestered us all in our homes, the Forward staff huddled about what we could do for the many people who felt isolated, unable to go to work or to see their friends and family.
A colleague turned to me and said: “Hey Rukhl, how about starting a YouTube series called ‘Yiddish Word of the Day’?” I did, and to my surprise, it immediately drew in many viewers and is still going strong four years later.
This was a wake-up call. Judging from the comments on YouTube and Facebook following each episode, I realized that there were many people who were fond of Yiddish but didn’t necessarily speak or even understand it. Although we had been producing Yiddish videos with English subtitles for decades, geared towards those who didn’t know Yiddish (like our cooking shows), this was our first entry into actually teaching the language to our viewers.
I learned something else from the viewers’ reactions to YWOD. Many said that it was great to hear the Yiddish, that they understood most of it but sadly, never heard anyone speak it anymore. Others said they weren’t Jewish but understood a lot of it because they knew German.
As a way of reaching those readers who understand Yiddish but can’t or don’t have time to read it, we’ve now launched a podcast, called simply Yiddish With Rukhl, where I read two Forverts articles in Yiddish related to a given theme. The first episode was about coffee; the second — about seeking love.
As I explain in my introduction to each episode, listeners don’t have to understand every word. What’s important is getting an opportunity to hear the language, to learn how these words are pronounced and to absorb the intonation, or the musical cadence of the Yiddish language.
To my surprise, within the first three days of launching the podcast, it had been downloaded over a thousand times. Many people emailed me or commented on Facebook about it. One woman wrote: “Your two podcasts were really enjoyable and got me through 40 minutes on the treadmill.”
Another listener wrote: “With near to zero knowledge of Yiddish, but with my native Dutch and fairly good German, I could understand quite a lot, even at speed 1.5! Listening a second and third time helped to understand more. Very clear and quiet diction. Many thanks. Hoping for more.”
Several listeners also gave us a great suggestion: that the landing page of the podcast include the links to the original printed articles, since being able to read and listen to the article simultaneously could turn the podcast into a great language learning tool. Happily, we obliged.
Yiddish with Rukhl can be accessed from the Forward’s landing page, as well as on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and Spotify.
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Why New York’s Sephardic Jews are more Zionist — and more wary of Mamdani — than their Ashkenazi neighbors
Differences between Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Sephardic Jews have come sharply into focus since Zohran Mamdani became mayor. In the greater New York City area, 10% of Jews identify as Mizrahi or Sephardic, two groups that report stronger connections to Israel and more conservative political views than Ashkenazi Jews, according to a new national study.
Aaron Cohen, a Moroccan Jew raised in Venezuela, and a New York City–based financial adviser, said, “I think it will be hard to find Sephardic Jews who voted for Mamdani because of how important Israel is to us.” For us, he said, “there is no divide between being against Israel and antisemitism.” He added that many in these communities who escaped socialist countries are also wary of Mamdani’s democratic socialist policies.
Unlike Ashkenazi Jews, most Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews arrived in the United States between the 1950s and 1990s, often fleeing openly anti-Jewish regimes and socialist regimes in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and Latin America. While some were able to immigrate to the U.S., many found that their only viable refuge was Israel, under the Law of Return, which grants every Jew the right to Israeli citizenship.
“Sephardic Jews are very Zionistic, because the state of Israel changed our lives,” Cohen said. “A lot of Jews from Morocco were saved by the fact that they were able to go to Israel. The same was true for Iranian Jews, Egyptian Jews, and so on.”
According to the study, conducted for JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, 31% of Mizrahi Jews and 28% of Sephardic Jews in the U.S. hold Israeli citizenship, compared with just 5% of Ashkenazi Jews. And 80% of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews say they feel somewhat or very emotionally connected to Israel, compared with 69% of Ashkenazi Jews.
Mamdani has been outspoken in his criticism of Israel and identifies as anti-Zionist. He has repeatedly stated Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish state, but rather “as a state with equal rights.” An Anti-Defamation League report from December found that 20% of Mamdani’s administrative appointees have ties to anti-Zionist groups.
Those positions land poorly in these communities where, for many, Israel functioned as a lifeline. Ralph Betesh, a 22-year-old Syrian Jew from Midwood, described the Syrian Jewish community in New York, the city’s largest Sephardic community, as “super, super pro-Israel.” Before the election, he said, “In every Syrian group chat, they were sending things like, ‘Please everyone, go register to vote. This is crucial. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime election,’” Batesh said. “Even in shul, they would urge people to go vote.”
The primarily Syrian congregation Shaare Zion in Brooklyn, one of the largest Sephardic synagogues in North America, sent a letter to congregants before the High Holidays stating that to attend services, one must show proof of voter registration. While the synagogue did not endorse a specific candidate, the letter warned of “a very serious danger that can affect all of us.”
Memories of persecution and socialism
For Yisrael Cohen-Vásquez, a 21-year-old Lebanese, Iranian, Spanish, and Moroccan Jew who grew up in Buenos Aires and moved to New York at 13, the intensity of the reaction is rooted in the proximity of persecution. “The pogroms that happened to us are as recent as the 1990s,” he said. “This is not generational trauma. This is my parents’ trauma that I grew up listening to.”
Michael Anwarzadeh, an Iraqi Jew from Manhattan, expressed a similar view. “We understand, Iraqis, what having someone who is anti-Jewish in power means,” he said. “I can say that because my parents lived through it. I grew up listening to them, and I learned those lessons.”
Cohen-Vásquez is particularly alarmed by Mamdani’s recent decision to revoke the IHRA definition of antisemitism and lift restrictions on boycotts of Israel. “All these policies that are being changed are exactly what was introduced to Mizrahi communities in the ’70s and ’80s,” he said. “These were the indicators, the litmus tests, for the beginning of the pogroms.”
Beyond concerns over antisemitism and Jewish safety, Cohen-Vásquez said his family’s experiences “whether Lebanese, Argentinian, or Iranian” have also made him deeply skeptical of Mamdani’s “socialist policies.”
That perspective, he added, has often left him feeling misunderstood when sharing his views with Ashkenazi peers. “I feel like I had to defend myself and explain my family story,” Cohen-Vásquez said. At the same time, he said he was heartened by conversations with non-Jews in New York who had immigrated from socialist countries and, as he put it, “got it.”
“I felt more seen and understood by the Dominicanos and the Puerto Ricans in Washington Heights, and by African American communities in Harlem and Queens, than by Ashkenazi Jews.”
While Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews emphasize their deep attachment to New York, many describe a relationship shaped by repeated displacement and hard-earned lessons about how quickly safety can erode. “When you talk to anybody in our community now, you say, ‘Okay, where would you go?” Aaron Cohen said. “What’s your plan B? What’s your plan C?’”
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She thought she knew her mother. Then she learned about the concentration camp
Marisa Fox always knew her mother Tamar Fromer-Fox had secrets. Tamar never shared the circumstances under which her family had left Poland for Mandatory Palestine, only saying that they avoided the worst of the Holocaust. But years after her mom’s death in 1993, while searching for family records in Dąbrowa-Górnicza, Poland, Fox learned her mom had spent four and a half years in Gabersdorf, a labor camp that became a concentration camp in what was then Czechoslovakia.
In the documentary My Underground Mother, Fox, who is also an occasional Forward contributor, tries to piece together her family history (such as that her mother’s birth name was Alta, not Tamar) and understand why her mother never admitted she was a Holocaust survivor.
Making the film took more than a decade. Fox’s search took her across the globe: Tel Aviv; Berlin; Melbourne; Malmö, Sweden; Silver Spring, Maryland. She tracked down and interviewed dozens of women who had grown up with her mother or survived Gabersdorf with her. Most of them, including Fox’s mother, were teenagers when they were taken.
Although the film starts with Fox’s mother, it quickly expands into a larger story about the experiences of Jewish women during the Holocaust. The narrative is primarily driven by the survivors’ interviews, which are particularly powerful given how few Holocaust survivors are left to tell their stories. At the film’s New York Jewish Film Festival premiere, Fox said that only a handful of the people she interviewed are still alive.
Among their memories of the labor camp are those of brutal sexual violence. The women recall being lined up naked and paraded for visiting SS officers, who would then choose which of the girls — many of whom were 16 or younger — they wanted to sleep with.
These organized assaults are an aspect of the Holocaust that have not received much attention, partially because they were not highlighted on the international stage at the Nuremberg trials. Benjamin Ferencz, a chief prosecutor for the United States Army at the trials, told Fox that the American lawyers thought it would be difficult to convice Russians to prosecute sexual violence as a crime against humanity, given that Soviet troops themselves committed mass rape in liberated areas (American soldiers were also known to perpetrate this offense).
But amid the horror, the women in the camp bound together. One woman, Helene, remembers teaching the other girls Hebrew songs. When Fox’s mother fell ill during a shift, one of her friends did her work for her when the guards weren’t looking. The women also documented their experiences in a shared diary and wrote about their hopes that they would soon be free. Miraculously, the diary survived the war and its owner, Regina, passed it onto her daughter. Fox was able to use excerpts from the diary in the film, including a passage her mother had written.
After the war, Alta was smuggled to Mandatory Palestine by the Haganah and joined the Lehi, a Zionist paramilitary organization, and adopted the name Tamar. She later immigrated to the United States where she started college at 30. She married a native Brooklynite and created a new life for herself.
While some of the survivors condemn Tamar’s decision to hide her past, others understand that it could be easier to invent a whole new identity than try to reckon with such a traumatic experience. One woman, Sara, tells Fox that she named her son Christian so that he wouldn’t be seen as Jewish. Fox herself was originally named Mary Teresa (she changed it as soon as she could).
Growing up, Fox always heard her mother say “I was a hero, never a victim,” and her secrecy may have been essential to keeping that narrative alive. But by shining a new light on the strength of female survivors, My Underground Mother shows that telling the hard truths can also be heroic.
My Underground Mother will be screening at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival starting and the Boca International Film Festival in February.
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