123 Results

White Supremacists Increase Efforts to Recruit on College Campuses

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June 28, 2019 Edition: June 27, 2019 THE WEEK’S BIG 3 White supremacists increased college campus recruiting efforts with more propaganda distributions for the third straight year. ADL and partners are teaming up in an initiative to help redirect those seeking extremist content on the internet to material that exposes the falsehoods of these hateful movements. In a victory for immigration advocates, the Supreme Court ruled the Trump Administration cannot, for now, include the…

June 28, 2019

YouTube Launches New Push to Remove Extremist Content

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June 07, 2019 June 6, 2019 THE WEEK'S BIG 3 YouTube announces a new effort to remove extremist, white supremacist content from its platform, in what ADL called “an important step forward.” In an attempt to claim ‘prominent’ conservatives were being censored on social media platforms, a Fox News host cited an avowed anti-Semite as an example. Volkswagen is partnering with ADL to fund a new office in Berlin that will research and combat anti-Semitism throughout…

June 07, 2019

Jews in Germany Warned About Wearing Kippot in Public Due to Rising Anti-Semitism

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May 31, 2019 May 30, 2018 THE WEEK'S BIG 3 Jews in Germany were warned that wearing a kippah in public may be dangerous, due to a disturbing increase in anti-Semitic incidents. The Ku Klux Klan attempted to hold a rally in Dayton, Ohio over the weekend but failed spectacularly – being out numbered 600 to nine. Twitter is weighing whether banning white nationalists from their platform or allowing them to stay on and be debated is the proper approach in dealing with this issue. …

May 31, 2019

When Twitter Bans Extremists, GAB Puts Out the Welcome Mat

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March 11, 2019 The first in a series of reports co-authored by the Network Contagion Research Institute and ADL’s Center on Extremism The toxicity on social media creates victims online and online ecosystems that breed real-life hatred. Gab, a self-described “free speech” platform largely used by right wing extremists, has been the preferred platform for hatred and vitriol. Users include Robert Bowers, who posted on the site just before he massacred congregants …

March 11, 2019

Computational Propaganda and the Democratic Process

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March 01, 2019 By Samuel Woolley | ADL Center for Technology and Society Belfer Fellow On October 27, 2018 Robert Bowers shot and killed eleven people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Bowers was at least partially radicalized online. He made regular use of the extremist-friendly social media platform Gab. After months of anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant posts on the site he even wrote that he was “going in” shortly before the massacre. The day before the…

March 01, 2019

ADL's Issues in Latin America: The Year in Review

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December 21, 2018 With approximately 3 percent of the world’s Jewish population residing in Latin America, ADL works in partnership with the organized Jewish communal institutions to lend our voices when needed. Going into 2019, as challenges to Jewish community grow worldwide, ADL’s focus on strengthening relations with local Jewish communities across Latin America will continue to be paramount, particularly in areas of common interest. Political shifts …

December 21, 2018

Fighting Hate Through Games

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December 21, 2018 64% of American households have a member that plays video games for three or more hours per week. And these gamers are not just kids. In 2017, the average age of a gamer was 31, and there were more gamers over 36 than between 18 – 35 or under 18. At ADL’s Center for Technology and Society (CTS) we know that video games can be a meaningful force for good in society. We think games can be incredible tools in helping to challenge bias and create respectful and…

December 21, 2018

Gab Was Down For a Week, Forcing Extremists to Consider Their Alternatives

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November 05, 2018 UPDATE: On November 3, one week after the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue and six days after going dark, Gab found a new home at Epik.com. In a statement, Epik’s CEO, Robert W. Monster, explained his willingness to host Gab, writing, “De-platforming a haven of free speech is not about left or right.” He also quoted Edmund Burke’s famous warning, “Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it,” superimposed…

November 05, 2018

The Antisemitism Lurking Behind George Soros Conspiracy Theories

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A caricature of George Soros as a tentacled monster has appeared on various right-wing and pro-Russian web sites since at least 2015.

October 11, 2018 Hungarian Jewish billionaire, philanthropist and Holocaust survivor George Soros is widely recognized for funding progressive political and social causes, usually through grants made by his Open Society Foundations. As a result, Soros has become a lightning rod for conservative and right-wing groups who object to his funding of liberal causes. In far-right circles worldwide, Soros’ philanthropy often is recast as fodder for outsized conspiracy theories, including…

October 11, 2018

It’s Time to Examine How Online Disinformation Affects Social Groups

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July 26, 2018 By Samuel Woolley | Belfer Fellow with ADL's Center for Technology and Society Computational propaganda — the use of automation and algorithms on social media to manipulate public opinion — has become a global phenomenon. This has come as a surprise to many in the technology sector, and it’s quite the adverse development given that less than a decade ago experts hailed social media as a savior for democratic communication. Russian…

July 26, 2018

How We Can Use Games to Understand Others Better

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June 25, 2018 By Karen Schrier | Belfer Fellow with ADL's Center for Technology and Society Can games be used to support positive social change, connectedness, and caring, and help reduce bias? These are the big questions I will be exploring over the next year as a Belfer Fellow with ADL’s Center for Technology and Society. There are many questions in this area that need to be answered, but here are a few initial insights: Games may support empathy — but there are…

June 25, 2018

Anti-Semitic Robocalls Supporting Patrick Little Proliferate in California

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Patrick Little: "The Holocaust is a lie."

May 18, 2018 By Oren Segal | Director of the Center on Extremism Supporters of Patrick Little’s campaign for Dianne Feinstein’s U.S. Senate seat have taken up a disturbing new tactic: virulently anti-Semitic robocalls. Little, an unabashed anti-Semite and racist who attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, is polling at around 18%, well behind Feinstein in California’s party-blind June 5th…

May 18, 2018

Using Video Games to Fight Hate and Reduce Bias

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ADL's Center for Technology and Society's new and innovative work to fight hate and bias in games and emerging media.

May 17, 2018

No Longer Just a Prank: "Swatting" Incident Turns Deadly in Kansas

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January 10, 2018 By Brittan Heller | Director of the Center for Technology and Society & Aaron Sussman | Associate National Civil Rights Counsel It was a hoax turned deadly. On the evening of December 28, a distressed-sounding man called the police in Wichita, Kansas, and confessed that he had shot his father in the head, was holding his mother and sibling hostage, and had poured gasoline in the house, threatening to set it on fire. He then gave the police his address. …

January 10, 2018

So-Called "Twitter Purge" Deletes Accounts of Prominent White Supremacists, Hate Groups

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December 19, 2017 Following Monday's implementation of new safety rules on Twitter, a number of users associated with white supremacy and other hateful ideologies found themselves no longer allowed on the platform. "ADL commends Twitter for taking these significant steps to tackle hate on their platform. We long urged Twitter to push back against hateful and violent rhetoric, and these latest actions are encouraging," CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. …

December 19, 2017

YouTube Takes Step Toward Embracing Human Moderation and Fighting Abuse

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December 08, 2017 All online platforms with user-generated content struggle with how best to moderate that content.The stakes are especially high when the platform is exclusively aimed at young children. This is something YouTube, whose parent company Google is part of ADL’s Problem-Solving Lab, learned in a particularly disturbing way, as the young viewers of its popular YouTube Kids app were suddenly exposed to videos of their favorite characters suffering grisly deaths,…

December 08, 2017

10 Tips for Journalists Newly Covering Extremists

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November 27, 2017 By Mark Pitcavage, Senior Research Fellow for the Center on Extremism Many subjects are difficult to report on, but extremist and fringe movements are particularly difficult landscapes for journalists to navigate, strewn with rough terrain and the occasional landmine. As someone who has monitored right-wing extremism for more than two decades, I’ve had the pleasure of reading many fine works of journalism on extremist-related subjects, but I’ve also seen…

November 27, 2017

What’s a Game Jam and Why is ADL Doing One?

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October 20, 2017 Recently, a video game designer was working on a multiplayer first-person shooter game at a small studio. Others in the company were building battle maps, weapons, and different avatars — but she was the only person to raise her hand and say, "What are we doing to make sure that folks who are playing this game online aren't being totally awful to each other?" She decided to create community guidelines, looking at lists of hateful words to determine which words could…

October 20, 2017

How the “OK” Symbol Became a Popular Trolling Gesture

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May 01, 2017 Updated: 9/5/18 Has the simple thumb-and-forefinger “OK” hand gesture become a common white supremacist hand sign? Not quite, but it has become a popular gesture used by people across several segments of the right and far right—including some actual white supremacists—who generally use it to trigger reactions, or what they would describe as “trolling the libs.” This is thanks to a 2017 hoax campaign started by members of the…

May 01, 2017

Explosive Growth of Hateful Memes and Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories Against Jared Kushner

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April 10, 2017 An online campaign of anti-Semitism has been directed at Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and advisor over the past week. It comes in the context of Trump’s removal of chief strategist Stephen Bannon from the National Security Council and reports about a feud between Bannon and Kushner as well as airstrikes in Syria in response to the chemical attack last week. This campaign of anti-Semitism has been driven by white supremacists and anti-Semites…

April 10, 2017