Roughly 80% of the antisemitism found in mainstream media comment sections never uses a slur.
That's the finding from Dr. Matthias Becker's Decoding Antisemitism project. After more than a decade spent reading comment sections under the BBC, The Guardian, and other major European outlets, over 300,000 comments across Britain, France, and Germany.
Most of what he found doesn't look like hate speech to a keyword filter. It's a joke. A rhetorical question. A name dropped like a password.
Below an article about George Soros: "someone should give George Soros a shower." No slur. No threat. Nothing automated moderation will ever flag, but everyone who needs to understand it does.
In our latest episode, Becker talks with Ben Chertoff about what shifted after October 7, an unexpected overlap between antisemitism and misogyny in the data, and what he now tells the AI companies whose content guardrails he's helping to build.
Dr. Becker is an AddressHate Research Scholar at the NYU Center for the Study of Antisemitism and editor-in-chief of Digital Hate Review.
Watch the full episode on our page.
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