There have been at least 2.6 million anti-Semitic tweets in the past year

Thousands of Twitter users have harassed journalists with anti-Semitic messages.

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published 19 October 2016

Hundreds of journalists writing about the 2016 presidential race have faced anti-Semitic harassment on Twitter (we wrote about the harassment of GQ's Julia Ioffe here, and The Observer's Dana Schwartz here). But while at least 800 different reporters have been the targets of "overtly" anti-Semitic abuse in the last 12 months, the Anti-Defamation League has discovered that two-thirds of those "hateful tweets" come from just 1,600 Twitter accounts:

The report, the first of its kind, presents findings based on a broad set of keywords (and keyword combinations) designed by ADL to capture anti-Semitic language on social media. Using this metric, a total of 2.6 million tweets containing language frequently found in anti-Semitic speech were posted across Twitter between August 2015 and July 2016. Those tweets had an estimated 10 billion impressions (reach), which ADL believes contributed to reinforcing and normalizing anti-Semitic language — particularly racial slurs and anti-Israel statements — on a massive scale.There was a significant uptick in anti-Semitic tweets from January 2016 to July 2016 as coverage of the presidential campaign intensified ... The report also shows that more than two-thirds (68 percent) of the anti-Semitic tweets directed at those journalists were sent by 1,600 Twitter accounts (out of 313 million existing Twitter accounts). [Anti-Defamation League]

The ADL notes that the abusers "are disproportionately likely to self-identify as Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, or part of the 'alt-right,' a loosely connected group of extremists, some of whom are white supremacists." So far, Twitter has only deactivated 21 percent of the accounts that have targeted journalists with overtly anti-Semitic abuse. You can read the full findings of the ADL's report here.

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.

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