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Study: anti-Semitic hate speech against journalists has intensified throughout 2016 election

About 10 journalists bore the brunt of anti-Semitic messages and threats sent to journalists on Twitter in 2015 and the first half of 2016, part of an uptick in anti-Semitism that has emerged as a part of the 2016 election, the Anti-Defamation League reported Wednesday.

“Over the course of the 2016 Presidential campaign, an execrable trend has emerged: reporters who voiced even slightly negative opinions about presidential candidate Donald Trump have been targeted relentlessly on social media by the candidate’s self-styled reporters; reporters who are Jewish (or are perceived to be Jewish) have borne the brunt of these attacks,” the study found.

The journalist facing the most harassment has been Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart reporter who left the site for its treatment of then-Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields after she was grabbed by Trump’s campaign manager at the time, Corey Lewandowski. Shapiro has been an outspoken critic of the Republican nominee. Writer Julia Ioffe, who is a contributing writer at POLITICO Magazine, was also targeted this year after she wrote a profile of Melania Trump in GQ Magazine. (In response to the barrage of anti-Semitic abuse and death threats Ioffe was subjected to, Melania Trump said that Ioffe “provoked” the attacks.)

CNN’s Jake Tapper and Sally Kohn, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Tablet’s Yair Rosenberg and The New York Times’ Jonathan Weisman were also major targets, the study found. All in all, 10 reporters received 83 percent of the thousands of anti-Semitic messages and threats, 68 percent of which were sent by about 1,600 Twitter accounts.

According to the study, which analyzed tweets sent between August 2015 and July 2016, nearly 20,000 anti-Semitic tweets were sent to about 800 journalists. The study suggested that the total number of anti-Semitic tweets “could be much higher,” and it found that anti-Semitic hate speech on Twitter spiked beginning in January 2016.

The study also found that people engaging in anti-Semitic speech on Twitter were “disproportionally likely to self-identify as Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, or part of the ‘alt-right,’" but it cautioned that “this does not imply that the Trump campaign supported or endorsed the anti-Semitic tweets.”

“There is evidence that Mr. Trump himself may have contributed to an environment in which reporters were targeted,” according to the report. “Indeed, he repeatedly denounced reporters as ‘absolute scum,' and said of ‘most journalists’ in December 2015, ‘I would never kill them, but I do hate them. And some of them are such lying, disgusting people. It’s true.’ Accordingly, while we cannot (and do not) say that the candidate caused the targeting of reporters, we can say that he may have created an atmosphere in which such targeting arose.”

The study also reflected the challenges journalists face on Twitter, which has faced a persistent problem of hate speech and abuse online. Only about 20 percent of the accounts from which anti-Semitic sentiments to journalists were sent were deactivated.

“Half of the journalists we interviewed decided not to report the harassing tweets, some because they believed people should have a right to say whatever they want, and others because they weren’t confident Twitter would do anything to address the issue,” said the study. “Across the board, the criticisms of Twitter were consistent: The company doesn’t do enough to enforce its terms of service.”

This week, a POLITICO reporter received anti-Semitic death threats on Twitter.

