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]
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