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Reddit is rife with antisemitic conspiracy theories about recent attacks on Jewish people in the US – despite the site’s pledge to crack down on hate speech, the Anti-Defamation League said Friday.
Many conversations on the popular platform about antisemitic attacks have been dominated by the term “false flag,” a phrase used to imply that the violence was staged by the Israeli government to shift public opinion in favor of Israel and Jewish people, an analysis by the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society, obtained exclusively by The Post found.
The conspiratorial phrase was the second-most popular term in subreddits about the Boulder, Colo. firebombing in early June that injured 15 people marching to support Israeli hostages, according to the analysis.
One victim later died from her injuries.
It also appeared frequently in subreddits about the murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers in May outside a Jewish Museum in Washington, DC.
The antisemitic comments were allowed despite an update by Reddit to its policy on hate speech about nine months ago — which bans discussions “denying or minimizing the scale of a hate-based violent event.”
Yet antisemitic conspiracy theories have continued to dominate recent conversations, according to the ADL’s analysis of 6,000 posts about the Boulder attack and nearly 4,000 posts on the DC shooting.
Reddit largely relies on volunteer moderators and some employees known as “admins” to sift through comments and delete offensive posts.
There is some evidence that Reddit has begun clamping down on the spread of antisemitic conspiracy theories. The term “false flag” was found less frequently in conversations about the DC shooting in data gathered two weeks after the initial analysis, according to the ADL.
But the persistent presence of the term in subreddits about attacks on Jewish people poses the danger of being continually disseminated because Reddit is used to train AI bots.
“Discussions on Reddit directly affect the output of LLMs (language learning models),” the ADL warned.
“When harmful narratives against Jews take hold on the platform, it has the potential to make its way into these new and increasingly prevalent technologies.”
A spokesperson for Reddit said the platform always had a policy against comments denying hate-based violent events, and simply updated its policy with an example for clarity last year.
“Antisemitism has no place on Reddit, and we strongly condemn it,” a Reddit spokesperson told The Post in a statement.
“While any amount of hateful content is unacceptable, it’s also important to recognize the extremely low volume of content raised in this report.”
Some comments including the “false flag” term were innocuous, like in posts questioning why Reddit users would believe “false flag” conspiracy theories, the ADL said.
The analysis found that users in certain subreddits were much more likely to use the phrase in an offensive manner, like r/IsraelCrimes, a subreddit with more than 61,000 members that discusses Israeli military actions and claims to counteract “Zionist propaganda.”
Many posts including the term “false flag” on this subreddit alleged the DC shooting was a cover-up meant to distract from news earlier in the day, particularly that Israeli troops firing “warning shots” as foreign diplomats visited the West Bank, according to the report.
“Honestly wouldn’t put sabotage past Israelis. They’re willing to blow up their own citizens…so this coulda been an inside job,” one user wrote in a post included in the report.
Another wrote: “I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibilities that Israel is trying to cover this one up.”
Other conspiracists claimed the DC shooting was orchestrated to distract from starving children in Gaza, according to the report.
