Antisemitic comments directed at the 30 Jewish members of Congress are up 500% since Facebook’s parent company, Meta, dropped its independent fact-checkers and rolled back its efforts to moderate posts on the social-media site, according to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League.
The report, which the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society released on Thursday, states that the Jewish lawmakers saw an average of 6.5 daily antisemitic comments until Feb. 4, after which the number rose almost five times to 29.9 daily, on average.
The spike began a month after Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, who is Jewish, announced in January that he was doing away with guardrails that restrict hate speech and false claims.
U.S. President Donald Trump and his allies have accused social-media sites, including Facebook, of censorship, alleging that the platforms have blocked or downgraded political posts with which their owners disagree under the guise of fact-checking.
“The results of this study support our expectation that Meta’s new policies would allow increased hate, antisemitism and toxicity on Facebook, and potentially its other platforms as well,” the ADL report states.
“Rolling back its content moderation practices means highly visible Jewish users, such as members of Congress, are now receiving many times more antisemitic hate,” it adds.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the ADL, blamed Meta for the spike in Jew-hatred directed at Jewish lawmakers.
“Meta bears responsibility for the harm that its recent moderation policy rollback has caused as it is enabling, if not actively encouraging, antisemitic, hateful and toxic activity on its platforms,” Greenblatt said.
“This hate targeted at Jewish members of Congress is not only unacceptable but also a reflection of what all American Jews and regular users experience online daily across Meta’s social-media platforms,” he continued.
Among the comments cited in the report are references to “you friggin’ moron Jew” and “how about you introduce a bill to counter Israel’s influence in America, you Zionist shill.”
Meta said that all but one of the examples cited in the report wouldn’t have violated its policies before the January announcement.
“This report uses a flawed methodology and presents a false narrative, which its own findings contradict,” Daniel Roberts, a Meta spokesman, told JNS. “The document itself notes that there’s actually been a ‘decrease in the rate of antisemitic comments.’ As always, we remove violating antisemitic content when it’s found, and our enforcement here has not changed.”
The problem is larger than attacks on Jewish lawmakers, according to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the highest-ranking Jewish member of Congress and, per the ADL report, among those most targeted on Facebook with Jew-hatred.
“Social media has become a breeding ground for antisemitism,” Schumer said in a Senate floor speech on Thursday. “But it’s not just elected officials. Social media has become an easy way for hate groups to organize and proliferate their message against all sorts of communities and individuals.”
“They go after Jewish-owned businesses. They go after synagogues. They go after families,” Schumer said. “They direct antisemitic slurs even against individuals who might not be Jewish.”
Jew-hatred has spiked since the Hamas-led terror attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ADL reported 9,354 incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism against Jews in 2024. That was the most since the ADL began tracking such incidents 46 years ago.
“We must not allow antisemitism to grow unabated in America like wild weeds,” Schumer said. “It must be confronted at every instance, and it must be rooted out. We all play a part in fighting back against the forces of intolerance.”