Implicit Antisemitism and Covid-19 Conspiracy Theory on Twitter

Social media platforms are known to foster extremist rhetoric and ideologies, including antisemitism. Antisemitic conspiracy theories are often spread via mainstream social media platforms, especially during times of civic unrest. The COVID-19 pandemic created an opportunity for the alignment of long-standing antisemitic conspiracies with an international health crisis. This paper applies a mixed-methods approach of data analysis and qualitative coding to examine connections between COVID-19 conspiracy theories and antisemitism in US tweets. We identify six prominent categories of COVID-19 conspiracy present on Twitter (now known as X), each of which overlaps with common themes seen in antisemitic conspiracy theories. This conspiratorial content may be less likely to violate social media hate speech policies but nonetheless contributes to extremist discourse

2019-20 coronavirus outbreak · Antisemitism · Archaeology · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19 · Linguistics · Narrative · Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2 · Sociology · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · History · Media, Religion, Digital Communication · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Media and Politics · Virology