How Bad Is Antisemitism Online? It’s Increasingly Hard to Know.

As the Israel-Hamas war flooded social media with violent content, false information and a seemingly limitless swell of opinions, lawmakers and users have accused platforms like TikTok and Facebook of promoting biased posts.

Tech giants have denied the charges. TikTok, accused of elevating pro-Palestinian content, blamed “unsound analysis” of hashtag data. Some Instagram and Facebook users circulated a petition accusing the platforms’ parent company, Meta, of censoring pro-Palestinian posts, which Meta attributed to a technical bug.

Antisemitic content swarmed onto X, the platform formerly known as Twitter and run by the billionaire Elon Musk. X’s chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, said in a post on Thursday about antisemitism that “there’s no place for it anywhere in the world.”

Where the truth lies, however, is hard to glean, according to academic researchers and advocacy groups. They said the debates over content related to the Israel-Hamas war have highlighted the roadblocks complicating independent analysis of what appears on the major online services. Instead of being able to conduct methodical studies of online discourse, they must try to grasp its scope and effects using inefficient and incomplete methods.

The murkiness enables people to make dubious claims about what is dominant or popular online and allows the platforms to retort with similarly flimsy or warped evidence, limiting accountability on all sides, the researchers said.

“We’re in desperate need of rigorous, informed research on what the actual impact of platforms are on society, and we can’t do that if we don’t have access to data,” said Megan A. Brown, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan who researches the online information ecosystem.