Neo-Nazis are Using Twitter to Divide Jews and Black People
Neo-Nazis are Using Twitter to Divide Jews and Black People
Hate sites are exploiting recent antisemitism and Twitter's new vulnerability in order to divide Jews and non-Jewish Black people.
Warning: Much of this article contains disturbing content, including quotes that include racial slurs and hate speech. You may also find the content itself disturbing.
In late October, during the height of Kanye’s antisemitic tirades, a movement began. But not one you may have heard about.
It was one started by a group of bigots on unseen areas of the internet, largely ignored because of how hateful they are, but always suddenly in the news when a shooting occurs.
And while others spent all their energies focused on celebrities spreading antisemitism, this new movement flourished and exploited that distraction.
#TheNoticing, 4chan, and a coordinated attempt to divide communities
The Kanye dustup happened at the worst possible time: right when Elon Musk made it his mission to gut Twitter’s content moderation and safety teams. Twitter always had a miserable track record of removing hate speech, but with the complete removal of safeguards, it was now on track to change dramatically in this regard.
Without content moderation, social media has always and repeatedly become a cesspool filled with bigotry. More importantly, when a social media site as large and influential as Twitter removes those safeguards, it becomes a center of recruitment, where extremists go to take ideas that are popular in the corners of the internet and make them mainstream.
Outlets immediately reported the rise in hate speech that resulted, and Jewish outlets in particular pointed out how a hashtag called #TheNoticing was being pushed hard on places like 4chan and Telegram by hate groups to make antisemitism more mainstream. In the words of the extremists, it was an opportunity to “red pill” (recruit) “normies” (those who believe in conspiracy theories but haven’t fully bought in to antisemitism yet).
Often, this recruitment would be accompanied by videos, memes, and other propaganda meant to encourage indoctrination. And with Kanye’s high profile antisemitism, they would include him as a propaganda mouthpiece.
The goal: disunity and chaos
But in all the coverage of hate speech on Twitter, Kanye’s antisemitism, and 4chan’s hate speech push, very few seemed to focus on a more specific coordinated campaign by these hate groups, and one of the main goals cited in the spreading of #TheNoticing and other hashtags like #KanyeIsRight. And this campaign has massive implications.
Black people have become the target of a disinformation campaign pushed by white nationalists in order to “red pill” them into becoming antisemitic. The goal is not in any way to create some sort of solidarity between white people and Black people. Quite the opposite: in post after post on 4chan, users are celebrating how the dustup around Kanye, Kyrie Irving, and Dave Chappelle can make both Black people and Jews suffer by spreading bigotry between non-Jewish Black people and Jews.
The posts in 4chan are honestly too widespread to recount properly, but some examples of what’s being said:
The idea, then, was to use their successful #TheNoticing campaign to sow antisemitism among Black people, as well as to cause Jews to start to blame Black people for antisemitism.
Combine this with the fact that many when engaging in these tactics pretend to be Black or Jewish on sites like Twitter, which allow users to use fake names and pictures to identify themselves, and you have a toxic mix of disinformation, bigotry, and attacks on solidarity between communities.
The result has been a very real increase in tension and hate on Twitter and beyond.
4chan is often portrayed as a “corner” of the internet, but this downplays the influence a group of highly motivated, unified people can make on sites like Twitter: in many ways, the strategy around the hashtag was designed to game Twitter, by making it appear as if a hashtag is popular due to a small group boosting it at once, often with multiple accounts.
The result has been massive: according to Twitter analysis tool BrandMentions, #TheNoticing has been seen more than 10 million times since it launched, and been engaged with more than 100,000 times. The top associated hashtags are purposefully targeted at the Black community, including hashtags such as #BlackTwitter, #KanyeIsRight, and #IStandWithKyrie.
Many of the top posts are ones directed at the Black community, using the kind of propaganda that is typically directed at white people but repurposed for a different audience.
What this means and why it matters
Ultimately, while #TheNoticing was in many ways about simply spreading antisemitism, it was also very much about creating discord between communities.
As the quotes show, there are a number of things accomplished with this propaganda:
Vulnerable groups are far less effective at fighting against bigotry when they aren’t united. This is something that bigots perhaps understand better even than those they target, and why they constantly use this tactic. It is also a tactic that is largely ignored, making it easier to exploit.
By using minorities as “shock troops,” white nationalists believe they can make antisemitism more mainstream by having people who aren’t white take the fall for things that can hurt careers. They truly see Black people as cannon fodder in this situation, and it is actually their racism which makes them so gleefully target Black people.
This ultimately is about hurting both Black people and Jewish people.
As social media restrictions are removed on Twitter, overt antisemitism and racism are likely to become far more mainstream on the platform, allowing these accounts to achieve far more than they did before Musk took over. This is not seen as a one-off campaign: this is just meant to be the start.
And while I have no doubt that reading this may have been painful for you, it should be clear that all of this also provides a lesson for those who want to push back against bigotry.
First and foremost, it should teach us that if white nationalists are so concerned with breaking apart the connection between non-Jewish Black people and Jews, the solidarity between our groups represents a real threat to their view of the world and to their power. These campaigns are effective, and that means that counter-campaigns focused on bringing groups together should be doubly effective in the big picture.
Second, we should now see clearly how strongly connected antisemitism and racism are in the minds of white nationalists. The two are part of a whole, which is why so many mass shooters are both. The Buffalo shooter was an antisemite. The Tree of Life synagogue shooter was racist. And many shooters are radicalized directly on sites like 4chan and other similar hate communities.
In other words, whether we realize it or not, we are united. We are in this together, and that means we by definition depend on each other for survival. No one can tell you this more concretely than a Black Jew, who is constantly caught in this tug of war and which lived experience shows there simply cannot be a separation between such bigotries and their concurrent solutions. Racism hurts them. Antisemitism hurts them. Only unity can protect them.
Finally, we should realize what the power of small, united communities can do. 4chan is effective because it knows it’s small and yet uses a united push to make fringe ideas popular. The same can be done in return by motivated teams focused on solidarity.
We are not alone. We are not helpless.
We are strong when we realize our connections, and when we realize factionalism will only hurt us all.
I think there's some housecleaning we need to do, too. I think it might have been from you or one of your Twitter commenters that I learned that some frum rabbis still teach the Curse of Ham. This is a shonda & lashon hara, and needs to be called out. Preferably by frum rabbis, or at least other Orthodox -- and the wider Jewish community needs to know this is going on.