Secret meanings: Third of QAnon subreddits contain implicit antisemitism – study
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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% – 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 the 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.
In terms of methodology, Kopstein and co-author 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 10 researchers of the study then combined this list with terms from the hate speech dictionary and the 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.
Content retrieved from: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-848089.
