7. Discussion Trees on Social Media

Abstract

Antisemitism often takes implicit forms on social media, therefore making it difficult to detect. In many cases, context is essential to recognise and understand the antisemitic meaning of an utterance (Becker et al. 2021, Becker and Troschke 2023, Jikeli et al. 2022a). Previous quantitative work on antisemitism online has focused on independent comments obtained through keyword search (e.g. Jikeli et al. 2019, Jikeli et al. 2022b), ignoring the discussions in which they occurred. Moreover, on social media, discussions are rarely linear. Web users have the possibility to comment on the original post and start a conversation or to reply to earlier web user comments. This chapter proposes to consider the structure of the comment trees constructed in the online discussion, instead of single comments individually, in an attempt to include context in the study of antisemitism online. This analysis is based on a corpus of 25,412 trees, consisting of 76,075 Facebook comments. The corpus is built from web comments reacting to posts published by mainstream news outlets in three countries: France, Germany, and the UK. The posts are organised into 16 discourse events, which have a high potential for triggering antisemitic comments. The analysis of the data help verify whether (1) antisemitic comments come together (are grouped under the same trees), (2) the structure of trees (lengths, number of branches) is significant in the emergence of antisemitism, (3) variations can be found as a function of the countries and the discourse events. This study presents an original way to look at social media data, which has potential for helping identify and moderate antisemitism online. It specifically can advance research in machine learning by allowing to look at larger segments of text, which is essential for reliable results in artificial intelligence methodology. Finally, it enriches our understanding of social interactions online in general, and hate speech online in particular.