The advent of social media has, in many ways, enriched the lives of Internet users the world over, allowing a level of human connectivity that would seem unimaginable not even two decades ago.
Nonetheless, even an invention as spectacular as social media presents challenges, offering extremists and bigots platforms for the rapid proliferation of disinformation and hate. The antisemitic acts that Jewish communities worldwide have faced since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel – many of them undoubtedly inspired by online hate – have laid bare the direness of the situation.
Students for Justice in Palestine, the vociferously antisemitic student activist group with hundreds of chapters throughout North America, is one of many extremist networks that exploit this new virtual ecosystem.
Even as the horrific events of October 7 were still unfolding, SJP sent its propaganda machine into overdrive, particularly on Instagram, disseminating content celebrating the attack and expressly supporting Hamas to millions of users on the platform.
Since last July, the Antisemitism Research Center by the Combat Antisemitism Movement has monitored 276 Instagram accounts associated with SJP, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, and similar groups, documenting 269 posts that likely violate Meta’s (Instagram’s parent company) “community standards,” including 236 posts which fall foul of Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, which forbids glorification of terrorism. The ARC detailed its findings in a recently published report.
Details of just some of the content the ARC documented churn the stomach. On the same day as the October 7 slaughter, Bears for Palestine at the University of California, Berkeley wrote in an Instagram post, “Towfan Al-Aqsa [Hamas’s moniker for its attack] now stands as a revolutionary moment in contemporary Palestinian resistance,” and, “We support the resistance, we support the liberation movement, and we indisputably support the Uprising.”
Also, on that dark day, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality at the University of Michigan wrote, “Palestinians in Gaza are fighting back in unprecedented magnitudes [sic] toward the Israeli colonial entity,” and “Palestinians have broken free from their cage.” The group further asserted in the caption of the post, “Palestinians have the right to defend themselves from their oppressors.”
Pro-Palestinian groups referred to October 7 as ‘a people’s victory’
In October 2024, Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return at the University of Washington took to Instagram to share an image of a flyer reading, “A decisive people’s victory took place on October 7, 2023, when the Palestinian people and their resistance took historic anti-colonial action for a free Palestine… from the river to the sea.”
Other similar examples abound. SJP is promulgating expressly antisemitic propaganda – the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism lists “Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion” as a contemporary example of Jew-hatred.
Such pernicious views emanate from the very top. On October 12, 2023, SJP’s national umbrella organization published a “Day of Resistance Toolkit,” boasting of the “historic win” that Hamas inflicted on Israel not even one week earlier.
In other words, a prominent student network that purports to stand for “justice” and whose protest antics have rendered US campuses hostile environments for Jews and Zionists proudly supports a terrorist massacre that researchers have noted was “the deadliest per capita terrorist attack since the Global Terrorism Database started data collection in 1970.”
In addition to murdering 1,200 innocent Israelis, Hamas and other terrorists also committed sexual violence and kidnapped hundreds of innocent civilians – men, women, children, and infants alike – among other heinous crimes.
Former FBI counterterrorism intelligence analyst Matthew Levitt argued that October 7 was “one of the worst acts of international terrorism on record,” comparable to “the April 1994 attack by Hutu extremists in Rwanda, who killed 1,200 Tutsi civilians seeking shelter in a church outside Kigali, and the Islamic State’s June 2014 massacre of an estimated 1,700 unarmed Iraqi Shia military personnel fleeing Camp Speicher after the group seized control of Tikrit.”
Meanwhile, myriad SJP posts that the ARC documented glamorized Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist group member and former airplane hijacker Leila Khaled, while others lionized Lebanon-based Hezbollah and the Yemen-based Houthis, both regional terror proxies of the Iranian regime.
Some chapters promoted content inciting violence against law enforcement and donning Hamas symbols to agitate against local Hillel chapters. After a man named Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington in February 2024, some SJP chapters glorified his actions, painting him as a righteous martyr.
What to make of these findings? First, the wider public must shed any rose-colored view of SJP and its ilk. Members of the organization may tout “liberation,” “justice,” or even a “ceasefire,” but its extremist, pro-Hamas disposition is undeniable, stemming from an ideological commitment to the destruction of Israel that dehumanizes Israeli Jews as “colonizers.”
Extremists frequently couch their insidious aims in the language of “liberation.” For example, one American neo-Nazi group calls itself the “National Socialist Liberation Front.” News consumers should keep this in mind the next time they encounter a media report that describes campus anti-Israel protesters as merely “anti-war.”
Next, Meta must take stronger action to stem the flow of SJP’s hateful propaganda. At the time of writing its report, the ARC found that Meta had only suspended, at most, 7.7% of the accounts flagged for likely violating Meta’s policies. Such a low enforcement rate is likely because Meta has not proscribed SJP, meaning chapters’ accounts can undergo multiple “strikes” before permanent suspension.
Not everyone who seeks to use Meta’s platforms enjoys this privilege. According to the company’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, “individuals and organizations that ascribe to one or more of” the ideologies of Nazism, White Supremacy, White Nationalism, and/or White Separatism are proscribed because such views are “inherently tied to violence and attempts to organize people around calls for violence or exclusion of others based on their protected characteristics.”
By touting terrorism against Israeli Jews, SJP, too, “attempts to organize people around calls for violence” – a function of its ideological commitment to the destruction of the Jewish state. Accordingly, Meta should proscribe SJP and like-minded organizations. There is zero reason that pro-Hamas advocacy should be treated as any less contemptible than White Supremacy.
Critics might contend that in an age when social media companies exercise outsized oversight of the public square, content restrictions effectively limit free speech, even if the First Amendment only forbids governmental speech regulations.
Well-meaning individuals can engage in this debate constructively. But so long as companies like Meta take it upon themselves to moderate content, they should treat all forms of bigotry equally.
Ensuring that SJP cannot exploit some of the world’s largest social media platforms to spread antisemitic propaganda would go a long way toward restoring Jewish safety worldwide.
The writer is the research and data manager for the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM).
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