Implicit antisemitism is present in the content of over a third of the users of subreddits popular with QAnon members, a new study carried out by seven US universities revealed this week.
Overall, more than one-third – 34.79 percent – of users in the two QAnon subreddits wrote antisemitic content using implicit terminology.
The new study placed special focus on implicit antisemitism, which it stated is harder to identify than explicit Jew-hatred.
One of the researchers, Jeffrey Kopstein from the University of California, Irvine, said the findings, published online in PLOS One, have implications for tracking fast-moving changes in community-encoding language related to antisemitism as well as other group-based forms of hate.
“Explicit antisemitic utterances come at a cost ranging from social ostracism to deplatforming, so they’re frequently expressed in veiled ways online. Implicit antisemitic content and conspiracy narratives about Jews have been on the rise, especially on moderated platforms,” Kopstein said.
“This is a dangerous language game that can lead to escalation, dehumanization, and desensitization that can turn rhetoric into open intergroup contempt and to discriminatory views and norms.”
Kopstein explained how the ‘language game’ works. Overt language is used to establish meanings of implicit antisemitic terms and narratives. Following this, an ingroup, in the study’s case, the two subreddit communities, recognizes and then uses the secret meanings “while keeping others, including platform moderators, in the dark.”
“At the post and even at the sentence level, these co-occurrences operate to provide the ingroup with a roadmap or dictionary for interpreting the meaning of implicit terms and generalized conspiracy narratives when they occur without direct reference to Jews,” says lead author Dana Weinberg, sociology professor at Queens College, City University of New York.
Methodology
In terms of methodology, Kopstein and coauthor David Frey, the founding director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the United States Military Academy at West Point, created a list of implicit expressions strongly associated with antisemitic tropes and conspiracy narratives.
The ten researchers of the study then combined this list with terms from the hate speech dictionary and Anti-Defamation League database of slogans, terms, and symbols used by white-nationalist groups. These terms were then split into explicit and implicit ones, resulting in a word bank of 892 explicit and 278 implicit terms.
Within the bank of implicit antisemitism were terms historically used as indirect references to Jews, such as the names of influential Jews (Soros, Bloomberg, and Rothschild), terms like “banker,” “elite,” “globalist,” and also common antisemitic conspiracy phrases like “New World Order,” “Deep State,” and “Great Replacement.”
The list also included Holocaust references such as names of concentration camps, references to Nazis, and Holocaust denial terms like “holohoax.”
The final section of implicit terms were those in reference to Israel or Israeli politics.
Two specific QAnon subreddits were chosen – r/CBTS_Stream and r/greatawakening – both of which were de-platformed in 2018 due to threats of violence.
The researchers mapped connections between antisemitic keywords and references on the subreddits using qualitative coding.
The study revealed that while less than 7 percent of the two communities’ 34,500 users wrote content with explicit antisemitic content, nearly all of them included implicit antisemitic language.
Overall, more than one-third, 34.79 percent, of users in the two subreddits expressed antisemitic content using implicit terminology.
The most common implicit term was “deepstate” followed by “pedophile,” “cabal,” “satanism” and “globalist.”
The researchers also explored the co-occurence of explicit and implicit antisemitic references, finding that despite their relative infrequency across submissions and comments, posts with explicit antisemitic terms show strong patterns of co-occurrence with implicit antisemitic terms.
“With this study, we’ve provided a generalized method for examining how hate is subtly expressed in online communities,” says Kopstein.
“We’ve also shown how implicit references and generalized conspiracy narratives provide a vehicle for spreading and engaging antisemitic content with seeming impunity, readily reinscribing intended antisemitic meanings for receptive new audiences. ”
“If we want to combat online hate, we need to know how it actually works, how it draws people in, and how it spreads,” he adds. “This research takes us part of the way there.”
Why QAnon?
QAnon is a far-right US-based political conspiracy theory movement that began in 2017.
The researchers wrote that they chose to focus on QAnon because of the well-established presence of antisemitism within the movement.
The ADL describes QAnon as “a decentralized, far-right political movement rooted in a baseless conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by the ‘Deep State,’ a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, and that former President Donald Trump is the only person who can defeat it.”
As the study states, one of the central narratives is blood libel—the Jews stealing the blood of Christian children—as well as how the elites are a Jewish cabal working on behalf of a “Zionist-occupied government” (ZOG) to establish a “New World Order” (NWO).
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