In a coordinated campaign to sow dissent in the American Jewish community and inflame hatred against Jews, Twitter has been flooded with fake accounts of Jewish identities that endorse extreme views and anti-Semitic messaging.

The vast majority of the accounts have been identified clearly as handles that were created as recently as August 19, although a few were established in the past and revived over the past few days. On Monday, sharp-eyed Twitter users, like Attlee Solomon and Yair Rosenberg posted that they had traced the profiles to alt-right activists using the platform 4Chan.

Journalist Yair Rosenberg reveals 4Chan campaign of fake Jewish profiles on Twitter Credit: Yair Rosenberg / Twitter

Rosenberg tweeted an excerpt from a detailed 4Chan post and a thread continued from several days earlier titled “Operation My Fellow Jew,” calling for “a massive movement of fake Jewish profiles” on social media that are “as authentic looking as possible,” because “since Jewish shapeshift into whites, anytime they want, we can do the same to them.” By masquerading as a “Jew,” the post reasoned, “you are able to subvert Jews themselves.”

The poster also said he believed identifiably Jewish profiles with anti-Semitic messaging would be harder for Twitter to detect and remove than those of openly anti-Semitic non-Jews.

Fake Jewish accounts on Twitter Credit: Yair Rosenberg / Twitter

The accounts that were created have names that are identifiably Jewish – like “Rosenstein” and “Edelberg” – and include those of supposed leftist Jewish activists, Orthodox Jews, and Israelis.

The provocative tweets and retweets that they contain are focused on racial and gender issues, with an emphasis on immigrants and immigration in the United States and Israel.

Most of them repeatedly invoke “Jewish Supremacy” and use the hashtag #OpenBordersForIsrael. That hashtag is a popular slogan among white supremacists like former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, whose conspiracy theories accuse Jews of seeking to maintain a powerful ethno-state in Israel by letting only Jews immigrate there, while weakening other countries in the West by holding them to a different standard.

According to Duke and other anti-Semitic conspiracists, a Jewish cabal seeks to flood Europe and North America with immigrants from Asia and Africa as part of a demonic profit and power-grabbing scheme.

Open gallery view A seemingly fake account impersonating a Jewish woman on Twitter. Credit: Screengrab / Twitter

Even if the campaign is uncovered by the media, the 4Chan post points out, “it will create in fighting as righty Jews will accuse lefty Jews of being fake profiles.”

Indeed, at first, before the revelation of the 4Chan campaign some Twitter users first speculated that the accounts had been established by the far-left group Jewish Voice for Peace, since many of the fake accounts contained a link to that organization in their profile.

Tweet accusing Jewish Voice for Peace of creating the fake accounts Credit: Elder of Zion / Twitter

After the campaign was revealed and numerous accounts were reported to Twitter, they were removed.

But many still remain online – such as the profile of a woman who describes herself as the “Proud Mother of Gender-Queer Son, Professor of Comparative Gender Studies at the UAS, author of ‘The Multicultural Solution: Social Justice on the Gaza Strip,” or another, with a photograph of an ultra-Orthodox man who declares in his profile “Us Jews are too privileged for this society and it's best that we stop believing in the myth of the Holocaust” and tweets that “A Hebrew devil such as myself does not deserve shekels, but instead shackles.”

Jewish account decrying fake accounts Credit: Rabbi Abdiel / Twitter

Since the exposure of the campaign, several of the fake accounts have tweeted complaints and protests, supposedly outraged at accusations that they are not real Jews.