BRUSSELS, Belgium — The World Jewish Congress (WJC) issued an urgent call on Wednesday to major social media companies to step up their removal of antisemitic content after a new study revealed significant gaps in the enforcement of policies intended to protect Jewish communities. Data published by the organization, detailing the responses to 754 reports submitted by Jewish community members across Europe from February 2025 to April of this year, indicates that eighty-one percent of the reported content remained publicly accessible when the dataset was reviewed in May 2026.
Yfat Barak-Cheney, Executive Director of WJC’s Technology and Human Rights Institute (TecHRI), implored platforms to act before its too late. “Jewish individuals and institutions are the target of hate-fueled violence at a higher rate than any other religious or ethnic group. These acts are then glorified and promoted across social media platforms.”
“It is up to companies to enforce their policies and remove content when it violates existing standards designed to protect vulnerable communities,” she added.
Among the most serious learnings is that calls to harm Jewish community members continue to remain online despite robust reporting and evidence. Of 232 total inciteful posts, (i.e. those which included direct calls to harm to Jewish people) 151 were still accessible in May 2026. Included in this group are ISIS publications calling for attacks on synagogues and Jewish neighborhoods throughout Europe and the United States, as well as unambiguous calls to murder Jewish people.
The findings point to a structural enforcement failure across major social media platforms:
- 81% of reported posts (613 of 754) remained publicly accessible at the time of a liveness check in May 2026.
- Reporting made virtually no measurable difference: 19.5% of content formally flagged to platforms was removed, against 18.2% of content never flagged at all.
- TikTok was the exception, removing 64% of content overall; every other major platform removed less than 15%. Facebook combined the highest reporting rate (76% of posts flagged) with the lowest removal rate (13.9%).
- Israel-related antisemitism was the least enforced category: only 5.2% was removed, and content comparing Israeli policy to Nazism had a zero percent removal rate across 28 reports.
- Approximately six percent of all reports may warrant individual legal examination under EU or member state law, according to a preliminary assessment based on a sample review of the highest-risk categories. This included six shares of an official ISIS publication calling for attacks on synagogues, each reported to Facebook and each still live at the time of the check.
The report, the result of WJC’s European Commission co-financed HO:PE (Hate Online: Preparedness and Empowerment) initiative, constitutes the first systematic, community-sourced dataset of antisemitic online content collected through a purpose-built reporting tool across the European Union.
Among the WJC’s recommendations are calls to platforms to: review whether their policies and enforcement sufficiently account for antisemitism; demonstrate with data that their reporting channels are operationally effective; and address content that uses the Israel-Palestine conflict as a vehicle for antisemitism. It also calls on regulators to use their powers under the Digital Services Act to scrutinize platform risk mitigation practices, and on national authorities to establish clear referral pathways for antisemitic content that may constitute a criminal offence.
The full report is available here.
About HO:PE:
HO:PE is a project of the WJC Technology and Human Rights Institute (TecHRI), co-funded by the European Union under the CERV programme. Through the HO:PE reporting tool and a Europe-wide capacity-building programme, the initiative has trained Jewish community digital contact points across the EU to document, report and respond to online antisemitism.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
