Antisemitic comments on Facebook pages of leading British, French, and German media outlets

We conducted a cross-national study on antisemitic hate speech on the Facebook profiles of leading media outlets in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. In a combination of qualitative pragmatic analysis and quantitative analysis, we examined their comment sections concerning the conceptual and linguistic repertoire of verbal antisemitism in these three languages as well as the frequency of antisemitic utterances. The corpus comprises comments made in reaction to mainstream media Facebook posts reporting on the May 2021 escalation phase of the Arab–Israeli conflict, a context widely recognized as a contemporary vector for communicating antisemitic resentment. We contrast findings across the three countries and illustrate a variety of linguistic realizations of antisemitic concepts together with the interpretive steps used to identify them.

Matthias J. Becker, Laura Ascone, Hagen Troschke