Anti-Semitic Posts Surge on Twitter

Anti-Semitism has been resurgent in Europe for years. But it has taken on a new dimension in the United States with the emergence of the Trump campaign, whose battle against political correctness has provided a kind of on-ramp for bigotry to enter the political mainstream.

The NY Times reports that during an investigation, the Anti-Defamation League found that 2.6 million anti-Semitic messages were posted on Twitter from August 2015 to July 2016. Of those, 19,253 were directed at journalists.

There was a significant uptick starting early this year, when the presidential campaign began to intensify, the organization said in its report, to be released on Wednesday. More than 800 journalists have been the subject of anti-Semitic attacks on Twitter, with 10 of them receiving 83 percent of the total attacks.

The words appearing most frequently in the Twitter biographies of the attackers were “Trump,” “nationalist,” “conservative” and “white.” Many of the owners of the 1,600 Twitter accounts were anonymous, though at least two are prominent white supremacists: Andrew Anglin, the founder of the website The Daily Stormer, and Lee Rogers of the Infostormer.

The report was careful not to suggest that the Trump campaign “supported or endorsed” the anti-Semitic attacks, but noted that many had been sent by his supporters.

But some of the targets said that by evoking hostility toward minorities, Mr. Trump’s campaign had inspired and emboldened white nationalists and others to engage in acts of digital aggression toward “others” — including Jews — and toward Jewish journalists in particular.

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