Time is Running Out to Upgrade US Immigration Policy

BY AADI GOLCHA

 AUGUST 25, 2022
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Between ludicrously long backlogs and outdated policy, the current state of the American immigration system is a lose-lose. But, if Congress acts quickly, they might be able to change that.

The U.S. currently has a processing backlog of about 1.4 million employment-based green card applications, which — barring extensive reform of immigration policy — is on pace to take almost two centuries to complete. This year’s annual defense bill will likely be Congress’ only chance to resolve this issue for several years to come.

The green card pileup mainly affects skilled workers from countries with the largest populations. At the current rates, about 200,000 skilled Indian immigrants are likely to die before they receive a green card, a process that is expected to take until the year 2216, a whopping 194 years from now. In addition, hundreds of thousands of foreign-born children of H1-B visas will have to switch over to international student visas or self-deport, despite having lived in the country legally for nearly their entire lives. The only way to resolve this issue is to include the original versions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and U.S. Innovation and Competitiveness Act (USICA) in this year’s defense bill.

The U.S. economy depends on skilled immigrant labor, now more than ever. In 1990, Congress set an annual limit on employment-based green cards at 140,000 and temporary H1-B visas at 65,000. This limit has failed to keep pace with rapid technological advances which have dramatically accelerated the demand for high-skilled workers. The centuries-long current backlog for green card holders is not only unnecessary — it’s actively harmful.

A report from the National Association of Manufacturing and Deloitte found that the United States will have 2 million unfilled STEM jobs by 2025 due to a lack of qualified candidates. These jobs can’t be filled domestically, and the shortage is crippling the United States’ ability to compete on the world stage. China now produces over twice as many engineers per capita as the U.S., as domestic enrollment in programs such as electrical engineering continues to decline.

The original USICA included exemptions for STEM advanced-degree holders from annual limits on green cards, helping high-skilled immigrants from countries like India and China to avoid protracted visa backlogs, and attracting more international students. The Senate version of the bill guts these provisions, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has declared that he will not bring any immigration bills to the floor should Republicans take the majority in the upcoming midterms. The only way to resolve the backlog and put the United States on a trajectory to alleviate the dire STEM worker shortage is to pass the original USICA in this year’s defense bill.

In addition to green card backlogs, there are about 200,000 foreign-born children of H1-B workers facing deportation when they turn 21, colloquially referred to as “documented dreamers.” Dr. Dinsha Mistree, a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, explains, “We’ve got a lot of people who have come here as children of H-1Bs at the age of six months. Because of the current process, their parents won’t be eligible for green cards until those kids are twenty or thirty. When you’re 21, you are no longer eligible to be sponsored by your parents. So we’re going to have a number of kids here legally who are going to come of age, and then at 21, they’re going to have to get a university or employer to sponsor them, or they’re going to have to go to their home countries, which they haven’t lived in their entire lives.” The documented dreamer problem, in addition to creating chaos and uncertainty for so many children, has severe negative ramifications for the country at large.

Aside from the humanitarian challenges posed by the mass deportation of children who have been legally raised in America,  the situation also raises economic concerns. Taxpayers invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to educate each child. Deporting them would render that investment wasted. The NDAA includes a bipartisan provision to protect the children of green card applicants who face deportation when they age out of eligibility to remain on their parents’ visas. Failure to pass this act as part of this year’s defense bill could have catastrophic impacts.

All in all, U.S. immigration policy has failed to keep pace with the changing economic landscape, creating chaos in the lives of millions of immigrants, worsening the STEM worker shortage, and threatening future economic prosperity. Given the likely Republican midterm victory, and the subsequent moratorium on immigration bills being brought to the floor as a result, this year’s defense bill marks the last opportunity to resolve these issues for the foreseeable future.

Policymakers need to act now.

Aadi Golchha is a Young Voices contributor, economic commentator, and writer, proudly advocating for the principles of free enterprise. He is also the host of The Economics Review podcast.

At Long Last, Congress Considers a National

Domestic Workers Bill of Rights

BY BELLA DEVAAN 

 AUGUST 24, 2022
 AUGUST 24, 2022

$71,610.03: the back wages, interest, and civil penalties paid to a live-in domestic worker by their negligent employer in Seattle. In July, King5 News reported, the city’s Office of Labor Standards orchestrated the employer’s settlement – redress for their failure to pay minimum wage, provide overtime pay, and track payment.

“I would encourage other domestic workers to come forward and not to be afraid if they believe that the contracts and the form of payment are not being fulfilled according to the work that is done,” the anonymous domestic worker shared in the wake of her repayment.

In 2018, exactly three years prior, Seattle was the first city in the nation to pass a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. The ordinance instated a host of protections for domestic workers (defined as both employees and independent contractors, “who provide paid services to an individual or household in a private home as a nanny, house cleaner, home care worker, gardener, cook, and/or household manager”): entitlement to Seattle’s minimum wage, fair breaks during the workday, and written agreements outlining their employment.

Seattle also created a Domestic Workers Standards Board – composed of employees, employers, and community representatives – with investigatory and recommendation power through the city’s Office of Labor Standards. Because of the bill, that $71,610.03 ended up in the right hands.

Throughout the last decade, Domestic Bill of Rights legislation has proliferated in capitals and city halls – 10 states (mostly governed by Democrats) and 2 municipalities (Seattle and Philadelphia) boast these more robust worker protections. And they’ve paid off: a 2021 National Domestic Workers Alliance survey revealed that workers in states with Bill of Rights protections “report overall working conditions that are better than those reported by workers who live in states without a Bill of Rights.”

Still, the vast majority of domestic workers are under-protected. The 2.2 million estimated domestic workers in this country – over 90 percent of whom are women and a strong majority of whom are women of color – earned an unlivable median hourly wage of $12.01 in 2019.

While earning far too little, unconscionable percentages of these workers reportedfeeling unsafe at work (25 percent), did not receive breaks during working hours (36 percent), did not receive sick days (82 percent), did not have written agreements from their employers (84 percent), did not receive partial pay for late cancellation (81 percent), and did not receive pay for employers’ cancellations after arriving to work (76 percent).

The numbers speak for themselves: domestic workers deserve sweeping protections beyond uneven state-level policies. As such, legislators recently revitalized their push for a National Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. Originally introduced in 2019 by then-Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) along with Representative Jayapal (D-WA) in the House, Gillibrand and Jayapal reintroduced the bill with Senator Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM) in 2021 as Democrats lead across government.

On July 28th, 2022, the House Education and Labor Committee held a historic hearing on the legislation: “Essential but Undervalued: Examining Workplace Protections for Domestic Workers.”

The event, said National Domestic Workers Alliance Executive Director Jenn Stowe, was the “culmination of years of organizing and fighting for domestic workers and women of color across the country, for the last 15 years.”

The National Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights consists of three key components: including domestic workers in commonplace labor rights and protections, from which they’ve been long excluded; codifying new workplace rights and benefits, specific to domestic work; and bolstering capacity to enforce and implement the new law.

In other words, a Bill of Rights would not just rightfully classify care work as valued work, worthy of protection – it would recognize caregivers’ distinctive policy needs across state borders.

Through the legislation, domestic workers would gain access to paid overtime and sick days. They could expect a fair, safe standard of working conditions, or recourse for poor ones. They could expect written agreements and fair scheduling to guarantee and stabilize their access to work. And the Department of Labor, along with a newly commissioned national Standards Board – composed in part by domestic workers themselves – would provide oversight and avenues for public accountability.

Bill of Rights-favoring panelists at the hearing included National Domestic Workers Alliance’s president, Ai-jen Poo, along with C. Nicole Mason of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) and a member of Seattle’s Domestic Workers Standards Board, Dana Barrett.

A former employer of domestic labor, Barrett advocates for Bill of Rights legislation “to recognize the clear stake that I have in creating a fair and dignified system of care.” Fair workplace standards and wages, Barrett argued before Congress, “helped establish fair and reasonable employment relationships” by eliminating ambiguity. “Just bringing recognition to employers that home is a workplace helps create a better one.”

Panelists adamantly emphasized that racism and marginalization created domestic workers’ present precarity.

Domestic workers have borne “a long history of exclusion from foundational labor laws, rooted in the legacy of slavery in America,” testified Ai-jen Poo. “This workplace is hidden, isolated behind closed doors and in private homes.”

While hammering out the details of the New Deal’s signature inequality-alleviating legislation, the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, Southern lawmakers fought for the exclusion of workers in the domestic and agricultural sectors – overwhelmingly people of color. These labor reforms, and others throughout the mid-20th century, directly catalyzed America’s lowest rates of inequality – yet persistently left millions of working Americans out in the cold.

In a rapidly aging nation, the demand for care work is skyrocketing, and cannot be “automated or outsourced,” said Poo in Congress. Higher workplace standards and protections, she argued, will bolster quality of care and “help secure and also attract a strong workforce for the future.”

This Bill of Rights could be a similar kind of forward-looking liberty document for millions of American women of color as our first, supposedly universal version. “We see it as a statement of our collective values as Americans, a statement on how we respect all working people, regardless of whether they work in an office or in a home,” wrote Harris, Jayapal, and Poo in a 2018 op-ed for CNN.

Of course, the Bill of Rights is one way to invest in care. In the New York Times, Poo explained how workforce support is just one element of solving our caring crisis: the country should “holistically” invest in care at a scale akin to infrastructure. We need to raise workers’ wages and strengthen their protections – while also investing in Medicaid home and community-based services, child care subsidies, affordable healthcare, retirement benefits, and paid leave.

This legislative session, it’s unlikely that Bill of Rights-style protections and pursuant budget appropriations will make their way to President Biden’s desk – investments in care were all too absent from this summer’s Inflation Reduction Act, and Republican Committee members spent the hearing fear mongering about inflation, debt, religious descrimination, and how the legislation might undermine the ability to “make employees part of the family.”

But state by state, the tide is turning. Bills of Rights are up for passage in New Jersey and Washington, DC. And Seattle is going further with its commitment to domestic workers, allocating a quarter of a million dollars for outreach to inform workers of their rights – facilitating justice as delivered by the settlement this summer.

“Firstly, it was my ignorance of the laws and rights that I had,” said the domestic worker in Seattle. “But through friends who supported me to do it, I lost my fear and filed the complaint. It was worth the risk and a favorable result was given.”

Bella DeVaan is an Inequality.org Next Leader at the Institute for Policy Studies. You can follow her on Twitter at @bdevaan.

The Tight Connections Between Slavery and War

BY MONTI DATTA, ANGHARAD SMITH AND KEVIN BALE

AUGUST 24, 2022

Relief depicting slaves in chains in the Roman Empire, at Smyrna, 200 CE. Photograph Source: Jun – Flickr: Roman collared slaves – CC BY-SA 2.0

Some 40 million people are enslaved around the world today, though estimates vary. Modern slavery takes many different forms, including child soldiers, sex trafficking and forced labor, and no country is immune. From cases of family controlled sex trafficking in the United States to the enslavement of fishermen in Southeast Asia’s seafood industry and forced labor in the global electronics supply chain, enslavement knows no bounds.

As scholars of modern slavery, we seek to understand how and why human beings are still bought, owned and sold in the 21st century, in hopes of shaping policies to eradicate these crimes.

Many of the answers trace back to causes like poverty, corruption and inequality. But they also stem from something less discussed: war.

In 2016, the United Nations Security Council named modern slavery a serious concern in areas affected by armed conflict. But researchers still know little about the specifics of how slavery and war are intertwined.

We recently published research analyzing data on armed conflicts around the world to better understand this relationship.

What we found was staggering: The vast majority of armed conflict between 1989 and 2016 used some kind of slavery.

Coding conflict

We used data from an established database about war, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), to look at how much, and in what ways, armed conflict intersects with different forms of contemporary slavery.

Our project was inspired by two leading scholars of sexual violence, Dara Kay Cohen and Ragnhild Nordås. These political scientists used that database to produce their own pioneering database about how rape is used as a weapon of war.

The Uppsala database breaks each conflict into two sides. Side A represents a nation state, and Side B is typically one or more nonstate actors, such as rebel groups or insurgents.

Using that data, our research team examined instances of different forms of slavery, including sex trafficking and forced marriage, child soldiers, forced labor and general human trafficking. This analysis included information from 171 different armed conflicts. Because the use of slavery changes over time, we broke multiyear conflicts into separate “conflict-years” to study them one year at a time, for a total of 1,113 separate cases.

Coding each case to determine what forms of slavery were used, if any, was a challenge. We compared information from a variety of sources, including human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, scholarly accounts, journalists’ reporting and documents from governmental and intergovernmental organizations.

Alarming numbers

In our recently published analysis, we found that contemporary slavery is a regular feature of armed conflict. Among the 1,113 cases we analyzed, 87% contained child soldiers – meaning fighters age 15 and younger – 34% included sexual exploitation and forced marriage, about 24% included forced labor and almost 17% included human trafficking.

A global heat map of the frequency of these armed conflicts over time paints a sobering picture. Most conflicts involving enslavement take place in low-income countries, often referred to as the Global South.

About 12% of the conflicts involving some form of enslavement took place in India, where there are several conflicts between the government and nonstate actors. Teen militants are involved in conflicts such as the insurgency in Kashmir and the separatist movement in Assam. About 8% of cases took place in Myanmar, 5% in Ethiopia, 5% in the Philippines and about 3% in Afghanistan, Sudan, Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan, Uganda, Algeria and Iraq.

This evidence of enslavement predominately in the Global South may not be surprising, given how poverty and inequality can fuel instability and conflict. However, it helps us reflect upon how these countries’ historic, economic and geopolitical relationships to the Global North also fuel pressure and violence, a theme we hope slavery researchers can study in the future.

Strategic enslavement

Typically, when armed conflict involves slavery, it’s being used for tactical aims: building weapons, for example, or constructing roads and other infrastructure projects to fight a war. But sometimes, slavery is used strategically, as part of an overarching strategy. In the Holocaust, the Nazis used “strategic slavery” in what they called “extermination through labor.” Today, as in the past, strategic slavery is normally part of a larger strategy of genocide.

We found that “strategic enslavement” took place in about 17% of cases. In other words, enslavement was one of the primary objectives of about 17% of the conflicts we examined, and often served the goal of genocide. One example is the Islamic State’s enslavement of the Yazidi minority in the 2014 massacre in Sinjar, Iraq. In addition to killing Yazidis, the Islamic State sought to enslave and impregnate women for systematic ethnic cleansing, attempting to eliminate the ethnic identity of the Yazidi through forced rape.

The connections between slavery and conflict are vicious but still not well understood. Our next steps include coding historic cases of slavery and conflict going back to World War II, such as how Nazi Germany used forced labor and how Imperial Japan’s military used sexual enslavement. We have published a new data set, “Contemporary Slavery in Armed Conflict,” and hope other researchers will also use it to help better understand and prevent future violence.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Monti Datta is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Richmond; Angharad Smith is Modern Slavery Programme Officer, United Nations University, and Kevin Bales is Prof. of Contemporary Slavery, Research Director – The Rights Lab, University of Nottingham

More Young Americans are Using Cannabis and Hallucinogens. That’s Good News.

BY THOMAS KNAPP   AUGUST 25, 2022

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According to a recent National Institutes of Health survey, United Press International reports, “use of marijuana and hallucinogens among young adults in the United States reached an all-time high in 2021.”

According to the survey, 43% of young adults admitted to having used cannabis in the past year, with 8% saying they’ve tried LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, or other “hallucinogens.”

That, believe it or not, is good news.  Both of these “drug” categories have a history of use as long as the history of humanity, with known medical and mental benefits, few negative side effects, and virtually no correlation to violent behaviors.

None of these items should have ever been illegal to use, possess, sell, or grow/manufacture in the first place, and increasing familiarity with them continues to feed  growing opposition to the  “war on drugs.”

They’re all, in three words, “safer than alcohol.”

Which, the same survey says, remains the most popular “drug,” with binge drinking rebounding from a 2020 low and “high-intensity” drinking steadily increasing.

That’s the bad news.

If I knew one of my children (all now thankfully and safely out of their teens) was going out to “party,” and that recreational substances would be involved, I’d much rather they got into a bag of weed or some mushroom caps than into a case of beer or a fifth of bourbon. There’s just less potential for senseless brawls, sexual assault, or driving while impaired.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve personally got nothing against alcohol, and don’t think it should be illegal. I use it, although these days I drink maybe a six-pack of beer and a few ounces of whiskey a year; it used to be … well, quite a bit more.

Here’s the thing:

People have both self-medicated and recreationally dosed themselves with various things since there have been humans.

They’ll keep doing so, even if politicians get together and decree that they mustn’t.

The choice we face is not between a society of junkies and a “drug-free America.” History has taught us that neither of those things is going to happen.

The choice is between a society where we’re free to choose what we eat, drink, smoke, or otherwise ingest — and are responsible for what follows — or a society where eating, drinking, smoking, or otherwise ingesting the “wrong” substance may mean prison whether we harmed anyone else or not.

We’re moving in the former direction. And should continue to do so.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

Yoga Versus Democracy?

BY EVAN STEWART – JAIME KUCINSKAS

AUGUST 25, 2022
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Image by Anupam Mahapatra.

As the United States gets less religious, is it also getting more selfish?

Historically, religious Americans have been civically engaged. Through churches and other faith-based organizations, congregants volunteer, engage in local and national civic organizations and pursue political goals.

Today – the rise of a politically potent religious right over the past 50 years notwithstanding – fewer Americans identify with formal religions. Gallup found that 47% of Americans reported church membership in 2020, down from 70% in the 1990s; nearly a quarter of Americans have no religious affiliation.

Meanwhile, other kinds of meaningful practice are on the rise, from meditation and yoga to new secular rituals like Sunday assemblies “without God.” Between 2012 and 2017, the percentage of American adults who meditated rose from 4.1% to 14.2%, according to a 2018 CDC report. The number of those who practiced yoga jumped from 9.5% to 14.3%. Not everyone considers these practices “spiritual,” but many do pursue them as an alternative to religious engagement.

Some critics question whether this new focus on mindfulness and self-care is making Americans more self-centered. They suggest religiously disengaged Americans are channeling their energies into themselves and their careers rather than into civic pursuits that may benefit the public.

As sociologists who study religion and public life, we wanted to answer that question. We used survey data to compare how these two groups of spiritual and religious Americans vote, volunteer and otherwise get involved in their communities.

Spiritually selfish or religiously alienated?

Our research began with the assumption that moving from organized religious practices to spiritual practices could have one of two effects on greater American society.

Spiritual practice could lead people to focus on more selfish or self-interested pursuits, such as their own personal development and career progress, to the detriment of U.S. society and democracy.

This is the argument sociologist Carolyn Chen pursues in her new book “Work, Pray, Code,” about how meditators in Silicon Valley are re-imagining Buddhist practices as productivity tools. As one employee described a company mindfulness program, it helped her “self-manage” and “not get triggered.” While these skills made her happier and gave her “the clarity to handle the complex problems of the company,” Chen shows how they also teach employees to put work first, sacrificing other kinds of social connection.

Bringing spiritual practice into the office may give workers deeper purpose and meaning, but Chen says it can have some unintended consequences.

When workplaces fulfill workers’ most personal needs – providing not only meals and laundry but also recreational activities, spiritual coaches and mindfulness sessions – skilled workers end up spending most of their time at work. They invest in their company’s social capital rather than building ties with their neighbors, religious congregations and other civic groups. They are less likely to frequent local businesses.

Chen suggests that this disinvestment in community can ultimately lead to cuts in public services and weaken democracy.

Alternatively, our research posited, spiritual practices may serve as a substitute for religion. This explanation may hold especially true among Americans disaffected by the rightward lurch that now divides many congregations, exacerbating cultural fissures around race, gender and sexual orientation.

“They loved to tell me my sexuality doesn’t define me,” one 25-year-old former evangelical, Christian Ethan Stalker, told the Religion News Service in 2021 in describing his former church. “But they shoved a handful of verses down my throat that completely sexualize me as a gay person and … dismissed who I am as a complex human being. That was a huge problem for me.”

Engaged on all fronts

To answer our research question about spirituality and civic engagement, we used a new nationally representative survey of Americans studied in 2020.

We examined the political behaviors of people who engaged in activities such as yoga, meditation, making art, walking in nature, praying and attending religious services. The political activities we measured included voting, volunteering, contacting representatives, protesting and donating to political campaigns.

We then compared those behaviors, distinguishing between people who see these activities as spiritual and those who see the same activities as religious.

Our new study, published in the journal American Sociological Review, finds that spiritual practitioners are just as likely to engage in political activities as the religious.

After we controlled for demographic factors such as age, race and gender, frequent spiritual practitioners were about 30% more likely than nonpractitioners to report doing at least one political activity in the past year. Likewise, devoted religious practitioners were also about 30% more likely to report one of these political behaviors than respondents who do not practice religion.

In other words, we found heightened political engagement among both the religious and spiritual, compared with other people.

Our findings bolster similar conclusions made recently by sociologist Brian Steensland and his colleagues in another studyon spiritual people and civic involvement.

Uncovering the spiritual as a political force

The spiritual practitioners we identified seemed particularly likely to be disaffected by the rightward turn in some congregations in recent years. On average, Democrats, women and people who identified as lesbian, gay and bisexual reported more frequent spiritual practices.

We suspect these groups are engaging in American politics in innovative ways, such as through online groups and retreats that re-imagine spiritual community and democratic engagement.

Our research recognizes progressive spiritual practitioners as a growing but largely unrecognized, underestimated and misunderstood political force.

In his influential book “Bowling Alone,” Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam suggests American religious disaffiliation is part of a larger trend of overall civic decline. Americans have been disengaging for decades from all kinds of civic groups, from bowling leagues and unions to parent-teacher organizations.

Our study gives good reason to reassess what being an “engaged citizen” means in the 21st century. People may change what they do on a Sunday morning, but checking out of church doesn’t necessarily imply checking out of the political process.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.  

EXPLAINER
The algorithms behind the spread of online antisemitism

Researchers find social media technology and business model algorithms ensure that ‘the more engagement a post receives, the more users see it,’ driving antisemitic content online

By SABINE VON MERING and MONIKA HÜBSCHERT

An iPhone displays the Facebook app in New Orleans, Aug. 11, 2019. (AP/Jenny Kane)

THE CONVERSATION via AP — Antisemitic incidents have shown a sharp rise in the US. The Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based Jewish civil rights group that has been tracking cases since 1979, found that there were 2,717 incidents in 2021. This represents an increase of 34% over 2020.

In Europe, the European Commission found a sevenfold increase in antisemitic postings across French language accounts, and an over thirteenfold increase in antisemitic comments within German channels during the pandemic.

Together with other scholars who study antisemitism, we started to look at how technology and the business models of the social media platforms were driving antisemitism. A 2022 book that we co-edited, “Antisemitism on Social Media,” offers perspectives from the US, Germany, Denmark, Israel, India, UK and Sweden on how algorithms on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube contribute to spreading antisemitism.

What does antisemitism on social media look like?

Hatred against Jews on social media is often expressed in stereotypical depictions of Jews that stem from Nazi propaganda or in denial of the Holocaust.

Antisemitic social media posts also express hatred toward Jews that is based on the notion that all Jews are Zionist – that is, they are part of the national movement supporting Israel as a Jewish state – and Zionism is constructed as innately evil.

However, today’s antisemitism is not only directed at Israelis, and it does not always take the form of traditional slogans or hate speech.

Illustrative – Photo of the logo of US social network company Twitter displayed on the screen of a smartphone, May 2, 2019. (LOIC VENANCE / AFP)

Contemporary antisemitism manifests itself in various forms such as GIFs, memes, vlogs, comments and reactions such as likes and dislikes on the platforms.

Scholar Sophie Schmalenberger found that antisemitism is expressed not just in blunt, hurtful language and images on social media, but also in coded forms that may easily remain undetected. For example, on Facebook, Germany’s radical right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, omits the mentioning of the Holocaust in posts about the Second World War. It also uses antisemitic language and rhetoric that present antisemitism as acceptable.

Antisemitism may take on subtle forms such as in emojis. The emoji combination of a star of David, a Jewish symbol, and a rat resembles the Nazi propaganda likening Jews to vermin. In Nazi Germany, the constant repetition and normalization of such depictions led to the dehumanization of Jews and eventually the acceptance of genocide.

US President Joe Biden lays a wreath at the Yad Vashem Holocaust

 memorial in Jerusalem, July 13, 2022. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)

Other forms of antisemitism on social media are antisemitic troll attacks. Users organize to disrupt online events by flooding them with messages that deny the Holocaust or spread conspiracy myths, as QAnon does.

Scholars Gabi Weimann and Natalie Masri have studied TikTok. They found that kids and young adults are especially in danger of being exposed, often unwittingly, to antisemitism on the very popular and fast-growing platform, which already counts over one billion users worldwide.

Some of the content that is posted combines clips of footage from Nazi Germany with new text belittling or making fun of the victims of the Holocaust.

The continuous exposure to antisemitic content at a young age, scholars say, can lead to both normalization of the content and radicalization of the Tik-Tok viewer.
Algorithmic antisemitism

Antisemitism is fueled by algorithms, which are programmed to register engagement. This ensures that the more engagement a post receives, the more users see it. Engagement includes all reactions such as likes and dislikes, shares and comments, including counter comments. The problem is that reactions to posts also trigger rewarding dopamine hits in users.

Because outrageous content creates the most engagement, users feel more encouraged to post hateful content.

However, even social media users who post critical comments on hateful content don’t realize that because of the way algorithms work, they end up contributing to its spread.

In this illustrative photo from July 10, 2019, the Facebook logo 

is seen on a computer in Washington. (Alastair Pike/AFP)

Research on video recommendations on YouTube also shows how algorithms gradually lead users to more radical content. Algorithmic antisemitism is thus a form of what criminologist Matthew Williams calls “algorithmic hate” in his book “The Science of Hate.”

What can be done about it?

To combat antisemitism on social media, strategies need to be evidence-based. But neither social media companies nor researchers have devoted enough time and resources to this issue so far.

The study of antisemitism on social media poses unique challenges to researchers: They need access to the data and funding to be able to help develop effective counterstrategies. So far, scholars depend on the cooperation of the social media companies to access the data, which is mostly unregulated.

Social media companies have implemented guidelines on reporting antisemitism on social media, and civil society organizations have been demanding action against algorithmic antisemitism. However, the measures taken so far are woefully inadequate, if not dangerous. For example, counterspeech, which is often promoted as a possible strategy, tends to amplify hateful content.

To meaningfully address antisemitic hate speech, social media companies would need to change the algorithms that collect and curate user data for advertisement companies, which make up a large part of their revenue.

There is a global, borderless spread of antisemitic posts on social media happening on an unprecedented scale. We believe it will require the collective efforts of social media companies, researchers and civil society to combat this problem.