Twitter has failed at controlling horrifying anti-Semitism

Of the 1,600 Twitter accounts that have sent out thousands of anti-Semitic tweets targeted at journalists over the past year, Twitter suspended just 21% of them. This number is among the many deeply disturbing details included in a new report out Wednesday from the Anti-Defamation League. A quick search of the hashtag #zionazi or #ovens is all one needs to confirm that senseless hatred is alive and well on Twitter.

Perhaps more than any other social network, Twitter has struggled to quell the masses of hatred and abuse that seem to thrive on its platform. As harassment and abuse has gone viral on the site, Twitter has moved steadily away from its early motto of being “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” It has banned revenge porn, issued new anti-harassment rules, established a trust and safety council and suspended high-profile users it considers abusive.

Yet still, between August 2015 and this past July, the ADL report reveals, users sent out more than 2.7 million blatantly anti-Semitic tweets.

If Twitter’s lack of action against them surprises you, it shouldn’t. Twitter suspended so few of these accounts for a two main reasons. First, for the most part, Twitter only looks into whether a tweet is a violation of its terms of service if another user flags it. This means that a tweet can easily make the rounds within the echo chambers of anti-Semitic white supremacy without ever attracting so much as an incredulous eyebrow raise from a Twitter administrator. Secondly, the social network has time and time again failed to accurately and consistently assess abuse when it does make its way into Twitter’s review process. Twitter’s abusive behavior policy is famously vague, but even when the violations of it are indisputable, the network often fails to act. Earlier this year, I experienced this first hand when Twitter failed to take action against several death threats against me that very clearly violated its harassment policies.

Oren Segal, the director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism, told me that among the people the organization spoke to, many reported an inconstant response from Twitter to anti-Semitic tweets directed at them.

“At the ADL, we recognize what anti-Semitism looks like,” said Segal. “But the people reviewing these tweets might not. Education is a big part of this.”

The ADL report looks most deeply at the impact of anti-Semitic harassment directed at journalists. A manual review of tweets containing anti-Semitic language found nearly 20,000 overtly anti-Semitic tweets targeted at 800 journalists. The majority of those were directed at just 10 journalists and came from a mere 1,600 accounts.

Some of the journalists the ADL interviewed decided to temporarily leave Twitter after becoming the target of anti-Semitic tweetstorms. Half of those interviewed decided not to report the harassing tweets at all, some citing a lack of confidence that Twitter would do anything to address the issue if they did.

“I think suspending or deleting [attacker’s] accounts is pointless, because they just come back on under a different name,” New York Times journalist Jonathan Weisman told the ADL. “Twitter has to decide if they are going to stand by their terms of service or not. If they decide tomorrow, ‘Look, we don’t have the capacity to monitor all of this, and we want it to be a free exchange of ideas,’–then fine, we would know what it was. But they want to have it both ways–the halo of having terms of service, but not enforcing them. Or enforcing them only sporadically.”