A new Israeli startup nonprofit initiative made up of olim (immigrants to Israel) is democratizing the fight against online antisemitism to get hate speech recognized and removed from social media platforms.
Tal-Or Cohen made Aliyah from Maryland right out of high school to serve in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as a lone soldier. Following her service, she double majored in law and political science at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, and was admitted to the Israeli Bar Association.
She became fascinated with the intersection of law and technology and the challenges that the legal sector has in keeping up with rapid developments, so she chose to work in hi-tech corporate law. However, after several years in this space she didn’t feel like she was making enough of an impact in Israeli society or for the Jewish people.
She then joined a consulting firm where she gained new skills in open-source and web intelligence research methodologies, being trained by top former IDF and Israeli police officers from intelligence and cyber. She began examining extremist movements in the United States and analyzing hate crime reporting in North America, eventually specializing in large-scale projects focusing on antisemitism.
As part of her approach to monitoring antisemitism for web-intelligence projects, she developed a dictionary mapping the ever-evolving coded language and slang of antisemitism on social media platforms. Keeping the power of policy in mind, Cohen strategized that the word data collected would be most applicable and relevant for lawmakers and institutional stakeholders if organized according to the 11 examples of Jew-hatred as defined in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. Her dictionary has since been adapted into Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and more.
“What shocked me the most [in my research] wasn’t the antisemitism I found in the corners of the dark web – unfortunately, that’s to be expected — but rather the virulent antisemitism that I found on mainstream social media platforms that went unchecked, remaining online despite being reported and clearly violating the platforms’ own policies against hate speech,” Cohen said.
Cohen realized that the issue was much larger than periodic studies could undertake. She created a new nonprofit organization, the Global Antisemitism Research Center (Global ARC). Global ARC is a startup initiative designed to drive the enforcement and improvement of community standards and hate speech policies across social media platforms and empower the fight against online antisemitism. The strategy and digital solution applies Israeli tech and web-intelligence to monitor leading social media platforms and organize the content collected into the first ever open-to-the-public database of online antisemitic content.
Global ARC Program Director Dr. Giovanni Quer is an oleh from Italy whose previous research at the Kantor Center for the Contemporary Study of European Jewry and the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies (both at Tel Aviv University) focused on European Jewry and antisemitism in the Middle East. Quer’s expertise is in forming the Global ARC policy guidelines, vetting the collected data, and identifying and alerting to online trends as they arise.
“We live in a world where the boundaries between the digital space and real life are blurred — with ‘Meta-hatred’ directly impacting daily life,” Quer said. “If we are to address this issue, we must understand the full scope of hate groups — how they emerge, operate, and connect, as well as the contexts and subtexts of their speech. Research into online antisemitism is in its infancy and faces considerable challenges requiring a nuanced approach. Simple keyword searches are not enough, as hate groups use coded language. For example, ‘Hollywood’ is often code for ‘Jews.’ Global ARC is a critical tool in democratizing the fight against online antisemitism by enabling everyone — researchers, practitioners of the humanities and computer sciences, policy makers, grassroots activists, and more — to gain deeper insight and empower their work in the fight against online hate speech.”
Cohen and Quer later added Lara Portnoy to the Global ARC team. Portnoy, a native of Overland Park, Kansas, attended Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy through 8th grade and graduated from Blue Valley North High School. She received her bachelor’s degree from Drew University in New Jersey and her master’s degrees in Middle East Studies and Politics of Conflict from Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, Israel. After her studies, she made Aliyah and worked for almost a decade in non-profit development and fundraising, including five years at the non-profit organization founded by The Peres Center for Peace and Innovation.
“We have all seen the increase in antisemitic content over the last few years in volume, violent rhetoric, and crazy conspiracy theories running rampant on social media platforms,” Portnoy said. “Accountability is low, transparency is lacking, and young people in particular are experiencing harassment, resulting in fear and anxiety like never before.”
Social media platforms already have community policies and guidelines, and content that violates these policies is sometimes removed. Some accounts get deleted after a certain number of violating posts and, most often, public pressure. However, the social media platforms still put the onus on their users, asking them to report violating content with no accountability, transparency or effective tool to consistently measure how this content is treated.
The Jewish community, despite being targeted with severe online hatred, makes up a small fraction of social media users. Antisemitic posts often do not get the number of reports needed for social media companies to act. Studies show that, even when vetted and reported, antisemitic hate speech is typically taken down typically only 3-10% of the time. The majority of monitoring and counter-hate resources focus almost exclusively on English, ignoring vulnerable global Jewish communities and leaving non-English speakers exposed to antisemitic content without recourse.
Global ARC hopes to change this, first by democratizing the fight against antisemitism and creating a user-friendly platform where Jew-hatred can be reported easily by users who want to engage in digital activism.
“To date, no monitoring efforts or one-off studies conducted by the major efforts against antisemitism have shared the data directly with the public – missing a major component of solving the inherent numbers game built into the platforms,” Cohen said.
Global ARC’s open digital solution will enable organizations and leaders actively fighting antisemitism to leverage the actionable data and make large-scale impact in their niche-capacity, demanding accountability from the social media companies and advocating for enacting legislation to take the onus of removing hate speech off the users and onto the social media companies themselves.
Global ARC works to make the data they collect a scalable solution by flagging the content according to the platform’s own policies and guidelines when relevant. This allows easier implementation by the social media companies’ content review teams by pointing to a mutual point of reference.
“The social media platforms we’re focusing on now are only the start. I want to take our work into gaming and chat platforms, like Discord and Telegram,” Cohen said. “I then want to see Global ARC become Global HARC — the Global Hate and Antisemitism Research Center. I absolutely believe that we can take our methodology and apply it to many forms of hate including Islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism against BIPOC, and more. There is much work to be done, but I know that we’re on the right path.”
“I firmly believe that Global ARC is a game changer that will create a safer public digital space where social media users feel safe to express their identity openly, thus ensuring a safer future for all on- and offline,” said Portnoy.
The public platform is set to launch on May 13, 2022, with monitoring taking place on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube in both English and Arabic. While Global ARC has already reached their minimum operating budget to launch, it is still seeking funds to enable technological expansions and for scaling to cover additional languages. Its website is www.globalarc.org.
