New anti-Semitic slurs used to evade social media algorithms

• Author: Arutz Sheva Staff
• Published date: 01 March 2021
• Date: 01 March 2021
• Publication title: Israel National News (Israel)

This sophisticated language, which is used for both propaganda and recruitment purposes, is hidden in plain sight and encourages violent incidents like the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand or the January capitol riots.

The study explores the emergence of this new language, its characteristics, transmission and usage and its findings are intended to serve both law enforcement and private sector hi-tech organizations in their quest to combat hate speech online. Given the popularity of the platform, the study focused primarily on images and messages disseminated on Facebook.

Posts used for the analysis were identified qualitatively after scanning hundreds of relevant groups and pages, eventually reaching a smaller sample of tens of pages (with a minimum of 500 followers or likes) as an initial seed group.

Much of this coded language the study found was shown to rely on the use of "dog-whistles," a coded message communicated through words or phrases commonly understood by a particular group of people, but not by others.

The method could be as simple as swapping one word for another such as far-right users calling Jews "Skypes," African-Americans as "Googles" and Latinos as "Yahoos."

Yet, some tactics are more intricate and dabble in numerology where numbers stand for people or concepts. The number 88, for example, stands for "Heil Hitler," since H is the eighth letter in the alphabet. Finally, the language also employed visual cues often by manipulating already popular memes found in pop culture. This method is by far the most sophisticated one as an...