Anti-Semitic Targeting of Journalists During the 2016 Presidential Ca

While the data are not designed to show why the attackers chose Twitter, the harassers clearly identified Twitter as a target-rich environment journalists routinely use and depend on Twitter for sharing information, soliciting sources and disseminating their work. We cannot conclude that Mr. Trump’s extensive use of Twitter “encouraged” these attacks. Mr. Trump’s use of Twitter as a key communications tool is notable, but the platform is used extensively by all candidates. We are also not attributing the abuse to the Twitter platform: as with all of the major social media companies, Twitter does not proactively monitor and regulate speech, but like other platforms, claims to respond when hate speech is reported. The issue of whether Twitter has * The above word cloud is based on the 2.6 million tweets. succeeded on this front is addressed later in this report. DETAILED FINDINGS ADL conducted a search of tweets using a broad set of keywords (and keyword combinations) designed by ADL to capture anti-Semitic language. These keywords did not include any terms associated directly with the 2016 presidential campaign. This yielded 2.6 million results. These 2.6 million tweets, which were posted by 1.7 million Twitter users, appeared an estimated 10 billion times – which means that this language was potentially seen 10 billion times. That’s roughly the equivalent social media exposure advertisers could expect from a $20 million Super Bowl ad - a juggernaut of bigotry we believe reinforces and normalizes anti-Semitic language and tropes on a massive scale. * The above word cloud is based on the 19,253 anti-Semitic Tweets directed at 800 journalists. * To the left are the most common Twitter hashtags appearing in the anti-Semitic Our next step, a manual review of tweets containing anti-Semitic language yielded 19,253 overtly anti-Semitic tweets mentioning 800 journalists. The 19,253 Tweets were seen approximately 45 million times, and sixty percent of these tweets were replies with anti-Semitic content sent directly to journalists or other users. tweets Sixty-eight percent of the 19,253 Tweets were sent by 1,600 Twitter users, confirming that these were persistent attacks on journalists by a relatively small cohort of Twitter users. 5

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