IJL Submission to the EU Commission – Annual Rule of Law Report: An Overview of Antisemitic Incidents (Online and Physical) in European Countries in the Past Year

In this report, the IJL finds that legislation and increased supervision of hate speech generally, and discourse related to “white supremacy” in particular, alongside financial pressure on the social networks, resulted in intensified enforcement by the networks themselves. As a result, the IJL detected a reduction of 25% in antisemitic discourse in 2019, in comparison with the volume of such discourse in 2018.

However, alongside the increased supervision of hate speech by popular social media platforms, the IJL found a significant increase in hate speech on unsupervised platforms, such as GAB, VK, 8CHAN, 4CHAN, Telegram and others. Data analysis by SEMRush found an increase of 360% in GAB traffic during 2019. Discourse analysis of GAB and CHAN8 reveals that activists promoting “white supremacy” and neo-Nazi propaganda began to write on these websites. 

For the full report click here.

This report is based on the legal reference in “Acts Adopted Under Title VI of the EU Treaty, The Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA of 28 November 2008 on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law.”

May 2020