Hateful tweets rise around Trump

Report documents anti- Semitic rhetoric

On Sunday night, Hadas Gold, a Politico media writer, began receiving threats on Twitter.

One image superimposed a yellow star of David on her shirt and a bloody bullet hole in her forehead. Another Photoshopped her face on a corpse in a concentration camp oven. The message: “Don’t mess with our boy Trump, or you will be first in line for the camp.”

Gold, whose grandmother fled Poland with her family weeks before Jews from their neighborhood were deported to concentration camps and whose grandfather lost about half of his extended family in the Holocaust, notified Twitter, which moved quickly to suspend the accounts.

Gold says these incidents have become increasingly common “the more we wrote about Trump, and the more we wrote about his rhetoric.”

A report this week from The Anti- Defamation League documented the rise in anti- Semitic tweets targeting journalists who cover the Republican presidential candidate. From August 2015 to July 2016, the ADL found 2.6 million tweets with anti- Semitic language. Of those, nearly 20,000 tweets were directed at 50,000 journalists in the U. S., with more than two- thirds of the tweets sent by 1,600 Twitter accounts. Words that appear frequently in the profiles of these Twitter accounts: Trump, nationalist, conservative, white.

“The report is representative of the bigotry and hatred that we are seeing play out on a broader scale,” said Oren Segal, director of ADL’s Center on Extremism and an author of the report.

During this turbulent election season that has fanned the flames of racism, xenophobia, sexism and bigotry, hate speech that typically resides in the dark recesses of the Internet has bubbled into the mainstream and onto Twitter, a popular online hangout for journalists and politicians such as Trump, who has millions of followers there.

Because people don’t have to use their real names on the service, they can attack people of color, women, Muslims and other groups with very little risk.

“This is only a fraction of what’s happening online right now as a result of the legitimacy ( that) various extremist ideologies have been given in this campaign season,” said Ryan Lenz, editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog. “We have seen a massive rise of hate speech.”

Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks says the campaign has “no knowledge of this activity” and strongly condemns “any commentary that is

anti- Semitic.”

“We totally disavow hateful rhetoric online or otherwise,” Hicks wrote in an emailed statement.

Conversations that take place on Twitter, famous for its 140character limit, tap into the nation’s pulse, be it the protests on the streets of Ferguson, Mo., the congressional sit- in over gun control or the launch of Beyonce’s Lemonade album. But more and more, people venturing onto the service to catch up on news or with friends are confronted with hatred and bigotry spewed by the fringes of society, Segal says.

“When there is such a volume, we have to ask ourselves what can we do? What can the Internet service providers do? What can vast segments of society do? So that we hold people accountable and create safe spaces online the way we expect those spaces to be in the real world,” he said.

For years, Twitter has faced sharp criticism for not aggressively enough policing abuse and harassment on its service. Twitter says its rules “prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others.”

Yet, if anything, abuse has increased. In one of the highestprofile incidents, Leslie Jones, who starred in the remake of the Ghostbusters movie, temporarily left Twitter after being targeted by racist trolls who compared her to primates including Harambe, the gorilla shot dead in May at the Cincinnati zoo.

“Ok I have been called Apes,” she wrote on Twitter at the time, “even got a pic with semen on my face. I’m tryin to figure out what human means. I’m out.”

Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and policy positions such as banning Muslims from entering the U. S. “have really mainstreamed Islamophobia in our nation,” said Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American- Islamic Relations.

“He’s given permission to all those who held anti- Muslim views or might have formed antiMuslim views recently to go public with them quite proudly. Whereas before maybe they would have been reluctant to be so open about their bigotry, now you have a major American public figure saying that’s perfectly OK. In fact, it’s somehow patriotic,” Hooper said.

Trump supporters have taken to Twitter and Facebook with hateful messages, saying in effect: “‘ Wait until Donald Trump gets into office and all of you will be gone. You will be in jail. Islam will be banned,” he said.

Irfan Chaudhry, a criminology instructor at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada, who has researched racism on Twitter, says these disturbing attacks that tend to be spurred by electionseason politics have been happening on Twitter for years, just never at this volume.

“During the last election, a lot of people were still trying to get a handle on what social media is,” Chaudhry said. “Now they know what it is, and now we are able to utilize it in more data- driven and analytical ways that give us these insights we weren’t aware of before.”

Observers say the targeting of specific groups of people by hate speech, particularly Jewish journalists, has dramatically intensified during the Trump campaign.

The anti- Semitic hate speech is coordinated in a way it has not been against any other group, said Sophie Bjork- James, a post- doctoral fellow in the anthropology department at Vanderbilt University. “While various groups have been targeted with hate speech on Twitter during this election, I don’t think anything compares to what Jewish journalists are going through,” Bjork- James said. “Many white nationalists have been inspired by the Trump campaign to increase their involvement, and a central part of this ideology is anti- Semitism.”

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