The Organization Monitoring Social Media for Posts Denying October 7th
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CyberWell is an innovative tech nonprofit that is focused on monitoring and combating the spread of antisemitism on social media. It recently reviewed and analyzed 910 potentially antisemitic posts on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter) over the past month.
According to Cybernews, the organization reported that more than a third of the analyzed posts either denied or distorted Hamas’ attack on October 7th. Over 38% of the posts denied that Hamas militants and their allies raped Israelis during their attacks, and more than 36% of posts claimed that Israel was itself directly responsible for Hamas’ actions. Users engaged with these posts over 901,233 times, as stated by the report released on January 27th.
Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, Founder and Executive Director of CyberWell, stated: “The morning of October 7th, Hamas militants sadistically recorded and, in some cases, even live-streamed their heinous attack on social media. Caught by surprise, these platforms rapidly became weapons of mass psychological terror during the attack, and once the true scope of terror was realized, are now being used by Hamas supporters to deny and distort the attack.”
Over a hundred days have passed since the attack by Hamas, and the atrocities committed have all been well documented. According to Cohen Montemayor, while all mainstream social media platforms have community standards policies prohibiting the denial of violent events (which has been extended to include Holocaust denial) these companies have yet to apply this policy to the denial of the events of October 7th, “the largest violent atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust.”
The organization also reports a rise in calls for physical violence against Jews and Israelis, increasing from single-digit percentages in the month before the war to 61% of all Arabic discourse monitored by CyberWell from October 7th. The most dramatic rise in the number of antisemitic content comes from Facebook, where there was an increase of 193% in the number of posts defined as highly probable to be antisemitic.
