Anyone who still believes that Instagram is just a social network for beautiful photos and Tiktok is a platform for funny videos has either never looked around there or has not looked around for a long time.

When the Middle East conflict escalated again in May 2021, there were two levels of discussion on Instagram, for example.

One dealt with the events on the content level, the other fed on the question of whether one should express oneself as an uninvolved person at all.

Kim Maurus

Volunteer.

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Public persons came under pressure to act more and more.

Because the more followers influencers have on Instagram and other social media, the greater the pressure of expectation of their followers to position themselves publicly on current topics.

In the case of the Middle East conflict, many high-reach users, such as top model Bella Hadid, rashly resorted to the explanatory tiles of questionable accounts and posted them in their stories.

A report by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation warns that such explanatory tiles often contain anti-Semitic narratives.

In some cases, anti-Semitism is deliberately coded and spread on social networks so that the content is not deleted, according to the publication "Anti-Semitism in pop culture: hostility to Israel on Instagram, Tiktok and in gaming communities".

Anti-Semitism disguised as criticism of the state

For their study, the authors used postings on Instagram and Tiktok as well as examples from the gaming scene.

The authors referred in particular to Israel-related anti-Semitism, which is often more difficult to identify because it is expressed as "apparently legitimate criticism of the state".

The properties of social media force users to reproduce political content as compactly as possible - which is sometimes used deliberately for one-sided presentations.

The report lists, for example, the Instagram account “key48return”, which posted a comic in which the word Israel was placed in quotation marks and the country was described as an “apartheid state”. Using the example of a Tiktok video, the authors explain how partially apolitical virtual reality filters are alienated, in this case on the occasion of the International Museum Day in May 2021, in order to flush anti-Semitic messages into the feeds of unreached users. The authors also analyze a Tiktok contribution from the @trtdeutsch channel, the German account of the Turkish public broadcasting company TRT.

In it, a woman who suffers a panic attack in front of the camera during air strikes by Hamas is accused of being staged. The contribution concludes that German media made use of such staging to highlight the suffering of the Israeli population. Contributions like this, it says in the report, made "the anti-Semitic conspiracy ideology of the 'Jewish-controlled' media compatible". According to the authors, the Middle East conflict is also being used in the gaming scene as an opportunity to spread anti-Semitism, for example through formulations in calls for donations for organizations with anti-Israeli positions.

In order to determine whether the content is anti-Semitic messages, the report recommends, among other things, the “3D test” by the Israeli politician and scientist Natan Sharansky.

Are Jews portrayed as “the ultimate evil” (demonization)?

Are different standards applied to Israel than to other countries (double standards)?

Is the country denied its right to exist (delegitimisation)?

In any case, it is important to never rush to share content and to endure the "position pressure" from followers.