Why Twitter & Social Media Are Such a Poison Brew of Antisemitism, Hate, Death, and Lies
Why Twitter & Social Media Are Such a Poison Brew of Antisemitism, Hate, Death, and Lies
These New Technologies Simply Allow Humans to Continue to Engage in Their All-Time Favorite Activities: Making War and Inflicting Cruelty Against One Another.
Click here to check out the first 30 Installments - Volume I - in this series on Antisemitism and Culture. Among the most important pieces from this first wave:
What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites
4 Stupid Reasons People Don't Take Antisemitism as Seriously as They Should
Is Qatar the Most Terrible State in the Middle East? Or Is Iran Worse?
7 Reasons This Christian Hippie Became a Zealot Against Jew Hatred
Why This Bible Thumper Is Going to Keep Using Plenty of Profanity
How Multi-Faith Mysticism & Maimonides Can Bring Peace to Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Everyone
This is the eleventh installment in Volume II, intended as another 30 installments exploring the many manifestations of Jew Hatred and the issues surrounding it in America and globally. See the previous installments in this collection below.
Martin Luther King, Jr: An American Hero and Courageous Zionist Voice
Talking to These Students Gave Me Hope in this Dark, Dark World of War and Hate
Why I Don't Expect the Palestinians Will *Ever* Make Peace with Israel and Thus Gain Statehood
The Antisemitism of Ron Paul's Far Right Anarcho-Capitalist Ideological Cult
When Holocaust Trivialization Manifests in the Wrestling World
2 Numbers Which Reveal the Overwhelming Level of Human Devastation Wrought by the Holocaust
The Deep Depths of Ideological Depravity: Comparing the Holocaust to the Covid-19 Vaccine
Unfortunately, Christian Nationalism Is the Normal, Much More Longstanding Version of Christianity
7 Great Counterculture Authors Who Inspire My Writing and Zionist Activism
These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.
It was not originally my intent to write this broad critique of the problems inherent across social media platforms as part of the antisemitism and culture series but then I stumbled across a pair of stories published on the same day regarding the prevalence of antisemitism on Twitter specifically and social media more broadly. So it seems to make sense to lead with these first two stories and then put them in the context of a few other recent critiques of Facebook and TikTok, concluding with a potential solution from the living thinker who has influenced me the most the last 15 years and who I described in this previous installment of the series:
First, at Jewish News Syndicate on January 26 came two brief stories worth reading.
First, “Twitter insufficiently anti-antisemitic, German lawsuit alleges”:
The company did not remove anti-Jewish, including Holocaust-denying, content, say the plaintiffs.
A lawsuit filed in Germany—where Holocaust denial is illegal—accuses Twitter of failing to sufficiently police antisemitic tweets.
The suit, which the European Union of Jewish Students and nonprofit HateAid filed jointly in a regional Berlin court, alleges that Twitter did not delete six antisemitic posts and refused to delete a tweet that denied the Holocaust.
“Twitter has betrayed our trust,” Avital Grinberg, president of the Jewish student group, said.
The plaintiffs drew on a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which suggests social media companies fail to remove nearly 85% of antisemitic posts brought to their attention, per TechCrunch.
Second, “Data show social media companies failing to remove antisemitism,” my emphasis added on a key point:
New data from CyberWell reveals that social media companies are underinvesting in monitoring Jew-hatred and Holocaust denial, with platforms only removing 20% of antisemitic content from their sites.
Data show that Holocaust denial is policed more aggressively than other forms of antisemitism, resulting in a removal rate of 36% for English posts but only 10% for messages in Arabic.
“These findings fit with what we’ve learned in studying how social media companies respond to hate speech: platforms will only devote resources to keeping users safe if enough people report problems, which puts Jews at a disadvantage,” said CyberWell CEO Tal-Or Cohen.
CyberWell is the world’s first live database of online antisemitism, using cutting-edge technology to collect digital hate so it can be studied and stopped.
The inability to adequately block antisemitic content on Twitter has been a longstanding problem which I’ve been hoping one of the world’s most serious creative geniuses - now that he owns the damn company - would figure out how to counter. This has been studied and reported on for a number of years. Here’s an Algemeiner article from September of last year noting recent research:
On Sunday, the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) said it found that between 2019 and 2020, over two million tweets about Jews and Israel were antisemitic, with one being posted every twenty seconds in 2020.
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In 2019, 6.9% of all Twitter conversations about Jews — 849,253 — were antisemitic. In 2020, 10.7% — 1, 531, 912 —percent were. That same year, an antisemitic tweet about Israel was posted every 5 seconds, totaling over 6 million, or 14% of all tweets about the Jewish State.
I’ll note at least one hopeful note with Twitter, though, after briefly giving each far right activist another chance on the platform recently, Twitter has now again suspended the accounts of the antisemitic Ali Alexander and Hitler-admiring white nationalist Nick Fuentes, the two most prominent advocates in the pseudo-presidential campaign of antisemite Kanye West. Of course this practically goes without saying: it was massively stupid to even reinstate these two hate-mongers.
But the problems inherent in Twitter are not the only deceptions and cultural poisons unleashed on global culture by the new social media behemoths. Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial are only one example of the malevolent effects of social media. Let’s discuss TikTok’s problems first before hitting up on the true popularizer of the social media technology - and the one I’m the most mad at still - Facebook.
When I was first planning this essay I intended to focus on this new incredible Substack essay from
at :
Gurwinder explains how the Chinese-made app, whose data the ruling Chinese Communist Party likely has access to, is a uniquely destructive social media innovation, making its core young user base more addicted, dumber, more psychologically damaged, and less able to concentrate:
Individually, such videos are harmless, but the algorithm doesn’t intend to show you just one. When it receives the signal that it’s got your attention, it doubles down on whatever it did to get it. This allows it to feed your obsessions, showing you hypnotic content again and again, reinforcing its imprint on your brain. This content can include promotion of self-harm and eating disorders, and uncritical encouragement of sex-reassignment surgery. There’s evidence that watching such content can cause mass psychogenic illness: researchers recently identified a new phenomenon where otherwise healthy young girls who watched clips of Tourette’s sufferers developed Tourette’s-like tics.
A more common way TikTok promotes irrational behavior is with viral trends and “challenges,” where people engage in a specific act of idiocy in the hope it’ll make them TikTok-famous. Acts include licking toilets, snorting suntan lotion, eating chicken cooked in NyQuil, and stealing cars. One challenge, known as “devious licks”, encourages kids to vandalize property, while the “blackout challenge,” in which kids purposefully choke themselves with household items, has even led to several deaths, including a little girl a few days ago.
There’s much more to Gurwinder’s post and analysis, including discussion of obscure Chinese ideologues who analyzed the weaknesses of America and sought to determine ways to exploit them. There’s interesting talk of how the app may intentionally be a form of cultural weapon the Chinese are utilizing to actively harm America and exploit its cultural weaknesses:
The first indication that the Chinese Communist Party is aware of TikTok’s malign influence on kids is that it’s forbidden access of the app to Chinese kids. The American tech ethicist Tristan Harris pointed out that the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, is a “spinach” version where kids don’t see twerkers and toilet-lickers but science experiments and educational videos. Furthermore, Douyin is only accessible to kids for 40 minutes per day, and it cannot be accessed between 10pm and 6am.
Has the CCP enforced such rules to protect its people from what it intends to inflict on the West? When one examines the philosophical doctrines behind the rules, it becomes clear that the CCP doesn’t just believe that apps like TikTok make people stupid, but that they destroy civilizations.
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And this is why TikTok could prove such a devastating geopolitical weapon. Slowly but steadily it could turn the West’s youth—its future—into perpetually distracted dopamine junkies ill-equipped to maintain the civilization built by their ancestors.
We seem to be halfway there already: not only has there been gray matter shrinkage in smartphone-addicted individuals, but, since 1970 the Western average IQ has been steadily falling. Though the decline likely has several causes, it began with the first generation to grow up with widespread TVs in homes, and common sense suggests it’s at least partly the result of technology making the attainment of satisfaction increasingly effortless, so that we spend ever more of our time in a passive, vegetative state. If you don’t use it, you lose it.
I don’t have a TikTok account. I always felt uncomfortable with its connections to the Chinese Communist Party and the hawk in me did sympathize with the view that it was some sort of foreign malevolent force to either collect data on Americans or further stupefy them with emotionally addicting them to cheap amusements on their phones. As something of a militant Xennial stuck between the Xers and Millennials and a bit loyal to my odd analog-to-digital cohort’s cultural preoccupations, I also couldn’t really get over recognizing that TikTok is predominantly a Gen-Z dominated culturally force and trend which may not last perpetually but could potentially be replaced by the next addictive social media app.
I was considering TikTok as a potential promotional venue to grow an audience for God of the Desert Books, but so far focusing on Substack has seemed a better use of time. After all, for a book company our primary market is people who like to read, not people addicted to watching short, stupid videos of people dancing, lip synching, and doing dangerous or stupid “challenges.”
I don’t know yet if I fully embrace Gurwinder’s analysis that TikTok is an intentional weapon that China is using to attempt to weaken the West by weakening its young people. He makes a compelling case and his whole essay is worth reading in full to consider the evidence, but for now, for me at least, it seems to fall into a similar category of probable-but-not-yet-adequately-proven conspiracy theory as Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa’s KGB-centered analysis of the JFK assassination which I laid out here:
Seems probable and makes a lot of sense based on the evidence available, but really not enough yet to know conclusively for sure. Never the less, the evidence is more than apparent that TikTok usage among the young can have very negative psychological and mental consequences.
Another app which has been demonstrated to have tremendously negative effects on young people I’ll just mention briefly as this is a fairly widely known fact at this point but still worth citing as part of the overall case against deep social media usage. In September 2021 The Guardian wrote how “Facebook aware of Instagram’s harmful effect on teenage girls, leak reveals”:
Facebook has kept internal research secret for two years that suggests its Instagram app makes body image issues worse for teenage girls, according to a leak from the tech firm.
Since at least 2019, staff at the company have been studying the impact of their product on its younger users’ states of mind. Their research has repeatedly found it is harmful for a large proportion, and particularly teenage girls.
“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said a slide from one internal presentation in 2019, seen by the Wall Street Journal. “Thirty-two per cent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” a subsequent presentation reported in March 2020.
But you don’t have to be young to have your mind deeply warped by the emotionally-manipulative bullshit flying around social media.
I present to you with some pride, the one Facebook status update which ever resulted in me having to go in “Facebook jail” for 24 hours, unable to post, and OH, am I ever proud of it. This is me at my PTSD-anger and hyperarousal-perception-driven best:
I made this Facebook status in the fall of 2021, perhaps a month or so after the violent incident which caused me to develop PTSD, so as you can note I was already intensifying in my levels of rhetorical rage and in hyperaroused ability to make strange perceptions and connections of the overall malevolence in the world and online. In a previous post in Volume I of the antisemitism and culture series I explained the key role that right-wing Covid misinformation had played in the death of my friend, Liberty Island’s senior columnist Tamara Wilhite, and how during the pandemic such lies ran rampant across conservative publications and flowed widely on Facebook in particular amongst my embarrassingly large assortment of right-wing, Trump-idolozing, “friends” and former colleagues.
My horror at this shift in the online media ecosystem which I’d regarded as a professional home for over a decade fueled my shift away from “the Right” and toward the Zionist focus which has been my focus ever since:
Regarding the wide spread of lethal Covid disinformation in right-wing social media circles, another Substack writer I’ve come to appreciate a whole lot, whose thoughtful take on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's counter-propaganda against the royal family I discussed yesterday,
of had written on the subject just a few months before I'd posted my angry anti-Zuckerberg status.An FBI-trained expert and now Yale professor on the spread of ideological propaganda in the modern age, Rangappa wrote in "Big Tech is the New Big Tobacco”:
Facebook, which admitted two weeks ago that an article claiming that the COVID vaccine causes death was the top-performing post on its platform from January to March. The finding, which was included in an internal report, was kept from the public by senior executives who feared that it might hurt the company’s image. The uncanny parallels between Facebook and Big Tobacco ought to make us reconsider how we think of “Big Tech” and its role in society.
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Facebook is not that different. Facebook, like most social media sites, has a revenue model based on advertising. What that means is that they make money by keeping users on the site as long as possible – thereby increasing the chance that the user will click on the targeted ads on their feed. Facebook conducts research to see what keeps users on the site, or returning for more. Do you find yourself unable to stop the endless scrolling on your newsfeed? Coming back to check how many “likes” or comments you have on a post? Well, thank Facebook – they know exactly what creates a dopamine rush that makes you unable to put your phone down. In other words, their goal is to keep you hooked – it’s literally the same brain chemical that some people get from gambling, or doing cocaine.
Even more troubling are the mental health effects of social media sites like Facebook, particularly on young people. As early as 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned of the potential effects of social media sites on teenagers, including cyberbullying, jealousy (based on self-comparisons with the projected image of their peers), and depression. More recently, members of Congress have called attention to the link between social media usage and teen depression and rising suicide rates – a correlation that Facebook has characterized as “inconclusive.” In fact, Facebook has barreled ahead with plans to create a version of Instagram for children under 13 – another echo of Big Tobacco’s attempts to get children interested in cigarettes through its advertising schemes. Facebook’s new initiative has prompted 44 attorneys general to write a letter to the company demanding that they stop.
The latest revelations on COVID misinformation show that the damaging effect of Facebook is now occurring at a national scale. What may have been, until now, detrimental effects at the individual level now have spillover consequences that affect everyone. Much like how the permissiveness of smoking in public places led to adverse health outcomes for nonsmokers due to the effects of secondhand smoke, Facebook’s business model has created a platform that allows, and even encourages, the spread of misinformation – like false claims about the COVID vaccine – which are not only leading to the deaths of the unvaccinated, but helping to facilitate a new surge of the Delta variant across the nation. That Facebook knew that it was complicit in this phenomenon, but chose to hide it, makes the need to hold the company to account feel even more urgent.
Facebook has known the negative consequences of its products for some time, and it knew entirely that it was making money by emotionally addicting people into spreading misinformation about Covid. And because I called out Zuckerberg by name for doing so, I was blocked from using Facebook for 24 hours. It was the one and only time that has ever happened to me in all my years of posting plenty of “controversial” material.
Rangappa had a more recent writing on her Substack about social media’s biases, and how the conventional, Oliver Wendell Holmes-style justifications of “free speech absolutism” simply do not work in the realm of social media:
The conventional idea behind free speech - the answer to bad speech is good speech, the idea that if we just all argue and debate long enough then the right ideas will triumph in the end - doesn’t actually work on social media because of the high profit-generating biases programmed into these platforms’ algorithms:
Basically, Holmes believed that an economic model could be applied to speech: The answer to bad ideas was not censorship, but better ideas. In this framework, the value of an idea would be reflected by how popular it was among rational, fully-informed consumers — and these “market forces” would naturally allow the best ideas (the “truth”) to rise to the top while bad ideas would fail and disappear. Sounds simple enough, right? Not really.
The problem is that for this to work, you have to have a close to perfect market — and social media is far from one. The primary obstacle is that the “value” of an idea on social media isn’t a reflection of how good it is, but is rather the product of the platform’s algorithm. For instance, Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes engagement — making content that produces strong emotional reactions more likely to travel farther and faster (privileging false content in the process). Further, a post can be artificially “liked” or amplified by bots or coordinated networks, thereby overvaluing its popularity or acceptance in the information ecosystem. And real users are apparently not rational consumers, as a perfect market envisions: A study by MIT found that false stories, including conspiracy theories, travel seven times faster on Twitter than true stories, mainly due to human user activity. In short, the features of social media platforms don’t allow for free and fair competition of ideas to begin with.
Because human beings are inherently more driven by emotions and primitive feelings rather than by cerebral facts and logical thinking, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are biased toward the spreading of content which most engages emotions, not what happens to be true or morally correct.
So what’s the answer to deal with these problems? Ban social media legislatively? Try and prevent kids from using these platforms? For those who skipped out on the basic lessons of 20th century American history: prohibitionist models simply do not work. When the government tries to crack down on anything from alcohol to drugs to pornography these activities persist in the shadows, if not even expand. That was one of the themes I discussed in my earlier essay on Sunday explaining the folly of Christian nationalist ideology. That attempting to hijack government to push more “moral” personal behaviors as it relates to “addictive” activities and substances just doesn’t work, generally producing the opposite of the intended effect:
So what is to be done? The answer is both simple to understand and, of course, very difficult - but necessary - to implement. I’ve been able to perceive problems inherent in social media for over a decade and see how they’ve grown much worse now because media analysis and media literacy have been among the cornerstones of my worldview primarily through my engagement with the work of Douglas Rushkoff, who has made the fields his speciality since the mid ‘90s starting with his early hit, 1995’s Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture.
Rushkoff’s most recent column at Medium is titled “Why Protecting Kids from Social Media May Make Things Worse.” He explains:
Just as we are coming to recognize that dirt makes kids healthier and developing immunity is a better strategy than killing every microbe with chemicals, I wonder if we may want to adopt a less protective, insulating approach to digital technology with our children. I know TikTok may still turn out to be a Chinese plot to undermine America, YouTube encourages ideological extremism, and Instagram leads many young people toward body dysmorphia, depression, and self-harm. And yes, the folks making these platforms are using the latest and greatest insights from behavioral psychology to create virtual Skinner Boxes of user manipulation. It’s dark and malevolent.
But certainly by the time our kids are teens, our hand-wringing about these harms and efforts to protect them with oversimplified warnings and forced abstinence may be missing the point. We may not want to shield young people from social media so much as assist them in their efforts to think critically and act purposefully in these spaces. And that means teaching them to think critically in all spaces.
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Rather than race to keep up with them or, worse, temporarily insulate them from digital culture, we need to retrieve what we most value about critical thinking, the humanities, and sociology in order to help them build the resistance they need to thrive in these spaces and, hopefully, transform them into something better than we left them with. If they were bringing a value system other than extractive capitalism and hyper individualism with them into the digital realm, that would be a start.
As I wrote about in this previous essay drawing on another Gurwinder article,
I don’t think that necessarily giving up on social media altogether is necessary or the answer - at least not yet. (I realize at some point things may get so bad that I might start advocating for that.) But for now I see social media as akin really to any sort of drug - the difference between medicine and poison is dosage.
Facebook can still be a useful tool in gaining emotional support from friends scattered around the country or even the globe. Often throughout my PTSD journey I’ve reached out on it when I’ve needed the sympathies of friends - doing so even led to my engagement to
. And through both Twitter and Instagram I’ve managed to make friends with people all over the planet and broaden my cultural perspectives in all sorts of ways, from hearing about the tribal conflicts in Nigeria, to the caste conflicts in India, to the debates among my Jewish friends, to the cultural controversies being discussed amongst America’s diverse black communities.Social media is still a young technology, and far too many of the people running the companies behind these programs are naive, morally blind, and overly money-driven. They’re not caring about the negative externalities of these products because, as I wrote about that SOB Zuckerberg, they’re just too busy figuring out “how to hack the corporate system to become a billionaire at the expense of the country.”
But this seems to be the case historically whenever any major new technology disrupts humans’ longstanding patterns of living. Radio when it was first being popularized was a source of the incredible spread of antisemitism through Old Right broadcaster Father Coughlin. Television has certainly led to its own negative consequences in making people less literary and more emotionally-driven in their thinking about everything. And now social media is giving voice to antisemitic, hateful voices that were once denied large platforms, and it’s doing so in a way which more powerfully emotionally addicts and psychologically addicts young and old alike far more effectively than television could.
I suppose in concluding this already too-long discourse into social media’s ills I should answer the promise of the title - Why Twitter & Social Media Are Such a Poison Brew of Antisemitism, Hate, Death, and Lies - directly.
When I started my professional political editing and activism career in 2009, I thought I was just running a media criticism blog and editing some online magazine’s articles about political opinions and hard-line terrorism analysis. But over the years I started to realize the broader scope of what I was actually participating in and pouring so much of my time and emotionally energy into: outright war between multiple groups of people who hate each other and want to destroy one another. Political and broader media propaganda is simply one more tool of war, and often the playground of espionage agencies seeking to foment conflict through propaganda and promoting conspiracy theories. And it’s been this way for centuries. I learned early on in my career, Carl von Clausewitz’s infamous aphorism: “War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means,” often abbreviated now into simply “War is politics by other means.” Political campaigns and political media are not simply individuals competing over ideas and figuring out how to engage in good government, they are territories in which actual wars connected to military conflicts are fought.
I explained this to a friendly guy I’ve been corresponding with on Twitter for awhile now, this often quirky inventor and founder of a business in which you can make your own custom pillow. A black man, he often tweets on racial themes and asks a lot of questions to understand how the discourse on these subjects has often grown so strange, even Marxist in nature. I explained to him what I’d learned about the subject through my studies into the USSR’s espionage efforts and Marxism more broadly:
So I quoted some of the first parts from this article at The Atlantic: “The History of Russian Involvement in America's Race Wars -From propaganda posters to Facebook ads, 80-plus years of Russian meddling.”
Arthur was still skeptical so I offered him another article telling the story:
After providing him the links and others offering additional books and articles on the subject Arthur vowed he would check them out later:
This same thing is now still happening, just on a much faster level through social media. Twitter and social media in broad will remain the domain of hate, cruelty, and ideological warfare because that is simply an expression of what humans want to do to each other, as the long history of humanity and its conflicts demonstrate beyond doubt.
War is not merely “politics by other means,” war is our nature as humans. And the sad state of social media is merely a mirror and medium of that reality.
I checked out TikTok precisely once. Barnes & Noble had mentioned something called "BookTok," so I wondered if that was worth getting involved in. Then I watched a few videos and had a very old-man "What on earth did I just watch?" reaction. There was no substance whatsoever. It was less than candy.
Maybe I just sampled the wrong videos, but everything I've heard about the site since has me convinced that it's best to just stay away from that one.