Current and former federal officials are warning that a surge in hate speech and disinformation about Jews on Twitter is uniting and popularizing some of the same extremists who have helped push people to engage in violent protests including the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
The officials are predicting that Twitter will contribute to more violence in the months ahead, citing the proliferation of extreme content, including support for Nazis by celebrities with wide followings and the reemergence of QAnon recruiters and white nationalists.
Since billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk bought Twitter just over a month ago, he has laid off more than half the staff, including most of the people who made judgment calls about what counts as impermissible slurs against religious or ethnic groups.
Musk announced a broad amnesty for most previously banned accounts and has personally interacted with fringe activists and white nationalists on the site in the weeks since he assumed ownership. Other actors have experimented with bigoted and antisemitic posts to test Musk's limits as a self-declared "free speech absolutist."
Even before Musk's takeover, some Twitter users were encouraging confrontations with transgender people and others who were depicted as "groomers," or predators who sexually target underage victims. But the new wave of antisemitism has reached millions of people in just days, brought new followers, and helped galvanize a broader coalition of fringe figures.
"This type of escalation and hate and dehumanization, the hatred of the Jewish population -- it's a really directed target. Violence is inevitable," said Denver Riggleman, a former Air Force intelligence officer who later served as a Republican member of Congress and then on the staff of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
The Department of Homeland Security warned Wednesday that domestic terrorists were maintaining "a visible presence online in attempts to motivate supporters to conduct attacks," citing increased risks for racial and religious minorities and gays and transgender people, as well as government institutions.
"Recent incidents have highlighted the enduring threat to faith-based communities, including the Jewish community," it said.
The bulletin made clear that online and offline conduct often reinforce each other in a cycle of escalation. The recent shootings at a Colorado gay bar drew praise online, encouraging potential copycat strikes, it said.
Likewise, a New Jersey man was arrested last month after publishing an online manifesto for attacks on synagogues, and a second man was caught with a gun after tweeting about plans to "shoot up a synagogue and die."
"The idea that there is a difference between online chatter and real-world harm is disabused by a decade of research," said Juliette Kayyem, a security business founder and former assistant Homeland Security secretary. Open expression on Twitter "re-socializes the hate and rids society of the shaming that ought to occur regarding antisemitism," she said.
CELEBRITY FACTOR
Leaders of the Jewish community in the U.S. and extremism experts have been alarmed to see celebrities with large followings spew antisemitic tropes. Some said it harkens back to a darker time in America when powerful people routinely spread conspiracy theories about Jews with impunity.
Most alarming to Joel Finkelstein, co-founder of the nonprofit Network Contagion Research Institute, has been the unification and elevation of voices little heard since the Capitol attack.
The institute has been tracking various indicators that show antisemitism is on the rise, including fast-multiplying Twitter references to the New World Order -- a theory that features cosmopolitan elites, sometimes explicitly Jews, wrecking institutions and values in multiple nations to exert more control.
But Finkelstein said he has seldom seen anything as dramatic as what happened when the rapper and producer Ye, formerly Kanye West, came back to Twitter and posted clips from an appearance on Alex Jones' Infowars show where he said, "There's a lot of things that I love about Hitler."
It wasn't just that Ye said something to his 32 million followers on Twitter that even most Nazis keep to themselves. It was that he let the banned Jones and conservative commentator Nick Fuentes tweet from his account, and Ye gained followers since proclaiming on Twitter that he was going "Death Con 3 on Jewish people." That remark got his Twitter account restricted, but not before it had caught the world's attention.
"Kanye is using antisemitism to popularize a list of actors who have been censored for a long time," Finkelstein said.
Fuentes was a Boston University student when he attended a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., that devolved into violence in 2017. He became an internet personality who used his platform to spread white supremacist and antisemitic views. Fuentes leads the far-right "America First" movement, with supporters known as "Groypers."
Former President Donald Trump hosted Ye and Fuentes for dinner Nov. 22 at his Florida home. Trump's critics and even some of his allies condemned the former president for hosting Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump claimed that he knew nothing about Fuentes before the dinner and defended his decision to host Ye at his club.
Musk acknowledged on Twitter that impressions of hate speech spiked Thursday after the Alex Jones incident, but said it had been trending down before that. Musk complained that the raw number of offensive tweets is misleading, however, because it treats tweets that no one sees the same as those with millions of views.
He did not say how Twitter counted hate speech, though, and researchers said it was unlikely to include hateful conspiracy theories or coded language.
Some groups that in the past had a direct line to Twitter's Trust and Safety team said that they are getting fewer responses to their complaints. The Anti-Defamation League said the proportion of tweets it reports that lead to a suspension or other action has fallen by half, to 30%.
Finkelstein said his group has stopped reporting anything, because all of its contacts at Twitter are gone.
Multiple members of Twitter's long-standing committee of outside safety advisers, including the Anti-Defamation League, said they did not know whether they were going to be disbanded or they would elect to resign.
GETTING ATTENTION
The overarching problem, Finkelstein said, is that racism and antisemitism work to draw attention. Extreme views get engagement from supporters, critics and observers. Engagement translates into profit. Others will jump on the trend.
That's why every other major social network has embraced content moderation, Kayyem said.
"Whether it's the individual or the group dynamics, they are feeding off this crap and this hate -- that is the reason why content moderation was created in the first place," she said. "Content moderation wasn't invented because they wanted everyone to be nice. It was created because of the realization that these kinds of attitudes, if allowed to foster in society, lead to violent conduct."
Jonathan Greenblatt, national director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said it is astonishing and alarming that two of the nation's leading purveyors of antisemitism were "breaking bread with the erstwhile head of the GOP."
"I would characterize this as the normalization of antisemitism. It has now become part of the political process in a way we hadn't seen before," Greenblatt said. "And that is not unique to Republicans. It is not just a Republican problem. It is a societal problem."
In April, the Anti-Defamation League announced that its annual tally of antisemitic incidents reached a record high of 2,717 in 2021, a 34% increase over the previous year and the highest number since the group began tracking the events in 1979.
Not everyone thinks political, racial or religious violence is bad. Trolls are clamoring to return to Twitter as Musk grants "amnesty" to suspended accounts.
Musk announced that his "amnesty" plan applied to accounts that haven't "broken the law or engaged in egregious spam." Online safety experts predict that the move will lead to a rise in harassment and hate speech.
Watchdogs also have rebuked Musk for some of his own tweets, including posting a meme featuring Pepe the Frog -- a cartoon character that was hijacked by far-right extremists.
One of those rejoining Twitter, 10 years after he was banned, is Andrew Anglin, editor of the Daily Stormer, for years one the best known openly racist and fascist publications.
In a leaked style guide, Anglin once explained that his goal is recruiting new neo-Nazis, and that blaming Jews was the best way to do that.
"As Hitler said, people will become confused and disheartened if they feel there are multiple enemies," Anglin wrote in the guide. "As such, all enemies should be combined into one enemy, which is the Jews."
On Friday, Twitter's software recommended Anglin's revived account under "who to follow" to everyday users, including writer K. Thor Jensen, who shared a screenshot with The Washington Post.
"I do a little monitoring of the far right for comedy purposes but have never Googled him or anything and had no idea he was reinstated on the platform," Jensen said. "It's just insane that the algorithm would push him at ANYBODY."
Information for this article was contributed by Joseph Menn of The Washington Post and by Michael Kunzelman and Freida Frisaro of The Associated Press.