Two years ago, on October 7, 2023, the world witnessed the deadliest antisemitic attack since the Holocaust. Hamas terrorists murdered over 1,200 people in Israel, wounded thousands of others, and took more than 250 people hostages in a brutal, coordinated assault that was livestreamed across social media platforms. These attacks were designed to go viral, with terrorists leveraging platforms to amplify terror internationally and cause psychological trauma. In essence, October 7 was the most successful hijacking of major social media platforms by a terror group.
The livestreaming of terrorist attacks—sometimes directly to the personal accounts of victims’ families—caused severe psychological harm. That trauma is now central to a $1.1B lawsuit filed in August 2025 against Facebook’s parent company by families of the victims of the October 7 massacre. If approved to move forward by the court as a class action suit, the case could set a global legal precedent that redefines the liability of big tech in broadcasting and platforming atrocities and terror attacks.
These same graphic October 7 attacks set off a global surge of online antisemitism. In the digital space, platforms became tools for a so-called “digital pogrom”— an internet flooded with antisemitic content, amplified by algorithms. Users were subjected to a 360-degree experience of hate: in posts, comment sections and direct messages.
This blog explores how hate now operates in the open—how antisemitism mutates in real time across social platforms, evades moderation, and increasingly blurs the lines between online incitement and offline harm.
CyberWell has tracked this degeneration in real time. What we’ve documented is a spike in hate speech, along with a rise in content consistent with the first example of the IHRA working definition: content glorifying and celebrating violence and calling for further violence online. This transformation has shown us how antisemitism operates—and thrives—online.
Monitoring Technology Flagged Content
While the initial spike in antisemitic content following the October 7, 2023, attacks has declined, overall levels remain significantly higher than before the attacks—indicating a lasting shift in the volume and visibility of online antisemitism.
CyberWell monitoring technology shows that in the year following the attacks (October 7, 2023 – October 6, 2024), there was a 53.1% increase in detected antisemitic content, marking a sharp escalation in online antisemitism. While the following year (October 7, 2024 – October 5, 2025) saw a decrease in detections, down by 26.2% from the previous year.
However, this still represents a 13.0% increase in detected antisemitic content compared to pre-October 7 levels. In other words, even after the initial surge subsided, or was responded to by increased enforcement on the part of the social media platforms, antisemitic content remained higher than before.
Antisemitism in the Age of Algorithms
Social media platform’s engagement algorithms reward emotion. Since October 7, 2023, antisemitic content, especially when charged with outrage related to the current conflict in Gaza, conspiratorial, or incendiary, has performed exceedingly well.
In the weeks and months following October 7th, this content wasn’t hidden. It was often pushed by algorithmic feeds that amplified user engagement on mainstream platforms. It appeared in multiple languages – English, Arabic, Farsi, or French – and was served to users who never actively sought it.
The result was a digital environment that amplified and normalized regular exposure to misinformation about the conflict and Jew hatred.
October 7 became a rallying cry in digital spaces, reframed as a heroic act and used to justify further attacks against Jews and Israelis. In the weeks after the massacre, users online deployed celebratory language like “remontada,” (a sports term meaning ‘a comeback’) shared graphic videos—such as footage of a bloodied Israeli soldier being stepped on by a terrorist during the October 7 massacre, that was posted with celebratory commentary—and reposted speeches lauding violence under the guise of games and metaphors. Pro-Palestinian rallies in New York on the one-year anniversary saw demonstrators openly chanting support for Hamas and other militant groups.
These acts of glorification helped normalize a narrative of justified revenge, laying groundwork for normalizing antisemitic violence.
From Posts to Bloodshed
The connection between online incitement and real-world violence became tragically clear in May 2025, when two young Israeli diplomats – Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim – were murdered at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. by a gunman who screamed, “Free Palestine” and waved around a keffiyeh. This marked a chilling escalation—the first known assassination of Israeli officials on U.S. soil in decades.
The suspect had reportedly been immersed in online spaces saturated with antisemitic propaganda, including memes, chants, and content glorifying the October 7 massacre—much of it stylized, coded, and able to bypass moderation systems.
Similarly, a man in Boulder, Colorado who carried out an antisemitic attack this past summer during a “Run For Their Lives” gathering in support of Israeli hostages had also been seemingly radicalized online. He planned the assault for over a year, driven by a desire to “kill all Zionist people.” Twelve people were injured and six people were hospitalized by his brutal attack which involved Molotov cocktails and a garden sprayer filled with gasoline. He later told investigators that he made the devices used in the attack after doing research on YouTube and learning what items he needed to buy.
Since our launch in 2022, CyberWell has documented the link between antisemitic statements and increased violence. Later that same year, an alert was issued to social media platforms in the aftermath of Kanye West’s antisemitic statements. For CyberWell, the murder of Lischinsky and Milgrim provided additional evidence within an ongoing pattern that online hatred can – and does – escalate into deadly offline violence. The surge in online antisemitism in digital spaces has exacted a very real toll of violence and as of 2025 become an increasing issue of national security.
The Vicious Cycle: Denial, Victim-Blaming and Escalating Hate
However, hateful propaganda often doesn’t end with violence – CyberWell’s recent reports documented that digital Jew-hatred is uniquely followed by widespread denial and conspiratorial self-victimization, i.e. blaming the Jews for allegedly orchestrating the violence against themselves. This was the case when the October 7 denial campaign started online as early as October 8 and repeated throughout multiple instances of widespread violence against Jews and Israelis, from the Amsterdam soccer pogrom to falsely blaming the Jews for firebombing their own synagogues in Australia.
Denial can take the form of outright rejection of an event, dismissing it as a hoax, or downplaying its severity. Blaming the victim for orchestrating the violence against them goes further. Conspiratorial self-victimization accuses Jews and Israelis of staging attacks to gain sympathy, political advantage, or influence public opinion – sometimes alleging they are even willing to harm their own people. In some cases, even when a perpetrator is clearly identified, claims emerge that the assailant was Jewish, or controlled by Jews, redirecting blame and absolving others.
This phenomenon has roots in Holocaust denial and distortion, which falsely blames Jews for perpetrating this genocide themselves.
CyberWell’s Forthcoming Report
To expose this growing trend of denial and blaming Jews for the surge in violence against them, CyberWell will soon release a comprehensive report on denial and conspiratorial self-victimization following violent antisemitic attacks. Covering content from across Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, and TikTok, the report tracks the spread of antisemitic narratives from November 2024 through August 2025, including attacks in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Europe.
The impending report analyzes a sample verified dataset of hundreds of pieces of content that, collectively, garnered nearly 14 million views and more than 500,000 interactions across major platforms. This makes it the second most-viewed dataset CyberWell has examined to date, second only to our earlier report on October 7 denial.
Key insights regarding platform enforcement gaps:
- Only 26.9% of policy-violating content in the dataset was removed – well below the 50% average removal rate documented in CyberWell’s 2024 Annual Report.
- X (formerly Twitter) hosted the largest volume of denial and conspiratorial self-victimization content, removing just 13.5% despite consistent reporting.
- YouTube had a similar removal rate (13.6%) but a smaller dataset, suggesting either lower prevalence or stronger proactive moderation.
- Meta – which does not currently classify blaming Jews for the violence committed against them as a policy violation – removed only 21% of denial and conspiratorial self-victimization content.
- TikTok achieved the highest removal rate (34.9%), though this figure remains low compared with the platform’s general enforcement rates for antisemitic content.
The report builds on CyberWell’s earlier analysis of the October 7 aftermath, in which denial and conspiratorial self-victimization appeared almost immediately after the massacre—and continues to this day. Worryingly, these removal rates have dropped as more time has passed since the October 7 massacre – raising serious questions about platform accountability for existing policies meant to protect against denial of mass violence events.
The cycle of denial looks this:
- Fetishize Death and Harm of Jews: Jews are humiliated, harmed, beaten, or killed as a result of a real-world antisemitic event. That event is filmed or photographed, and the content is dumped into engagement algorithms. Violence against Jews is sensationalized, turning human suffering into entertainment or “evidence” of conspiracies.
- Deny the Violence: After attacks, claims circulate that the violence is fake, staged, or provoked by victims.
- Calls for More Violence: Denial often leads to calls for new attacks, cloaked as “skepticism,” which escalate hatred and risk more violence.
By denying or questioning the reality of such attacks, online actors generate permission for future violence, making hatred not only persistent but increasingly normalized and dangerous for Jewish communities worldwide. Each iteration of this cycle normalizes antisemitism further, increasing the threshold of what humiliation and hostility a society tolerates against Jews.
From Online Hate to Real-World Violence
The October 7 massacres by Hamas was a moment of horrifying violence. But online, it was also a flashpoint for content creation, viral posts, and monetized hate.
CyberWell observed how content referencing the attack—some celebrating, some denying, others using it to spread conspiracy theories—proliferated in the days and weeks that followed. Much of this content was not removed. Some posts and videos were monetized. Others were even recommended by algorithms to new users.
What we’ve learned over the past two years is this: online antisemitism doesn’t just reflect real-world hate. It extends it, amplifies it, and too often, people profit from it.
Facing the Evolving Threat Two Years After October 7
Remembering the victims of October 7 means confronting this evolving reality head-on; because we’re not just seeing a resurgence of antisemitism, we’re seeing a transformation of it. Antisemitism has always been shape-shifting hate. This feature of Jew-hatred is likely truer in the digital universe, which is constantly enriched with new story-telling tools, memes, and now visual generative AI tools. As such, the fight against antisemitism requires vigilance, transparency, and accountability from both platforms and users. Jew-hatred also moves fast – antisemitic ideas evolve rapidly, are amplified at scale and can be monetized in the process. Only by understanding the depth and adaptability of online hate and remaining consistent and solutions-oriented can we hope to protect communities and prevent future violence.
To this day, 48 hostages remain in captivity in Gaza and the war against Hamas is still ongoing, creating a devastating humanitarian crisis for displaced Gazan civilians and unknown horrors for the hostages. At CyberWell, we remain hopeful that the current proposed peace plan will bring an end to the suffering and a swift reuniting of families with their loved ones.
However, we cannot have false hope that the end to the war in Gaza will mean an end to the current wave of Jew-hatred that has been globally amplified by digital pogroms. CyberWell remains committed to bringing scalable solutions to this phenomenon through digital policy compliance and the best available technology.
