TecHRI takes on the rise of online antisemitism, enhances human rights, and harnesses technology for positive societal impact. Read the latest updates here.

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a pre-launch event for TikTok’s Footnotes. Launched on Wednesday, TikTok is the latest in the growing trend among social platforms that are embracing crowd-sourced context tools to address misinformation. While TikTok presents Footnotes as an addition to its moderation toolkit, platforms like Meta (as of March 2025) and X/Twitter (since 2021) have already shifted away from professional fact-checking entirely in favor of user-generated “Community Notes.”

These systems are being marketed as solutions to the problems inherent in traditional fact-checking. Meta, for instance, announced its move to a Community Notes as a way to “reduce bias.” By March, the system had gone live in the U.S.—with all professional fact-checkers removed.

Given that 54% of US adults get news from social media sites, and these changes reshape content moderation practices on social media across all issues, we at the WJC Institute for Technology and Human Rights (TecHRI), are watching this shift closely. We are especially concerned with the impact it will have on Jewish social media users and other minority communities.

Read the full article here.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In response to the rise of violent extremism and terrorism across Latin America, the World Jewish Congress partnered with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Latin American Jewish Congress (LAJC) to host a two-day conference addressing key challenges and advancing multilateral cooperation in international counterterrorism efforts.

The workshop, held at the headquarters of the Organization of American States in Washington D.C., focused on understanding the threat landscape of extremism in the Americas and best practices for the prevention of violent radicalization.

During an appearance via video conference, WJC Director of International Affairs and Executive director of the WJC Technology and Human Rights Institute (TecHRI) Yfat Barak-Cheney emphasized the importance of multilateral cooperation and multistakeholder engagement in these efforts. “The threats we face are cross-border and multifaceted. Our responses must be too.”

Read the full article here.

From 5 to 6 June, Hannah Maman, Project Manager at the World Jewish Congress's Technology and Human Rights Institute (TecHRI), led a two-day training session in Madrid as part of Hate Online: Preparedness and Empowerment (HO:PE), an EU-funded initiative aimed at strengthening community capacity to address online antisemitism.

The training brought together professionals working across Spanish Jewish community organisations to examine how antisemitic content circulates on digital platforms and to build practical routines for identifying, reporting and responding to it.

The sessions combined conceptual and hands-on elements. Participants worked through how online hate speech operates in practice, including the distinction between illegal content and content that is harmful but lawful, and the difficulties created by inconsistent enforcement and limited transparency on the part of platforms.

A central component of the training addressed the structural reasons online antisemitism goes underreported: reporting mechanisms that are difficult to use, weak accountability for outcomes, and the absence of any feedback loop for the user who submits a report. Against that backdrop, Maman introduced the HO:PE tool, demonstrating how the browser extension and mobile application allow community members to submit reports through a single channel and how community representatives can then access, review and act on the resulting data.

Through case studies drawn from real content, participants assessed how individual posts might be categorised, whether they would be likely to be removed under existing platform guidelines, and how context shapes moderation decisions.

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.

The WJC Technology and Human Rights Institute (TecHRI) launched on Thursday its Hate Online: Preparedness and Empowerment (HO:PE) project to combat the scourge of online hate. Funded by the European Commission, HO:PE is an online antisemitism-reporting tool, comprised of both a browser extension and mobile application, that allows users to report harmful content in a few easy steps.

The HO:PE tool will be provided to additional EU member states and other Jewish community organizations, to empower Jewish communities to identify and report antisemitism in real-time, while also educating users on what constitutes as ‘illegal’ behavior and what their civil rights are based on EU legislations. It also addresses the present shortcomings in how law enforcement and tech platforms respond to reports by identifying patterns through reported content across different platforms and languages.

Learn more here.

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.

In a TikTok Trust and Transparency Center blog post, Adam Presser, the platform’s Head of Operations, Trust and Safety, discussed the growing threat of digital antisemitism and how the social media platforms can become vehicles to combat hate and disinformation.

Read more here.

On Boaz Hepner's podcast episode, "Wikipedia's War on Truth: The Fight Against Bias Toward Israel," WJC Technology and Human Rights Institute Executive Director, Yfat Barak-Cheney, urged platforms like Wikipedia to take responsibility for content about Israel and the Holocaust published without proper oversight. Discussing the risks of user-driven fact-checking, she said, “Fact-checking has a lot of disadvantages, but I think opening it up completely to people… you at least need to recognize that it’s not going to result in neutral information.”

Watch the full episode here.

The Indiana University 2025 Datathon & Machine Learning Competition to Combat Antisemitism, supported by the World Jewish Congress Technology and Human Rights Institute (TecHRI), invites students to work with university researchers to train machine-learning models that identify and analyze antisemitic content on major social media platforms. The event reflects ongoing efforts by TecHRI and its Advisory Council members, including Indiana University’s Gunther Jikeli, to advance data-driven approaches to combat online hate.

The competition, sponsored by the WJC in cooperation with the Jewish Federation of Greater Indianapolis, Diane M. Druck, and the Bright Initiative by Bright Data, will be held virtually from July 13 to 27, 2025.

Since its founding in 2024, TecHRI has collaborated with global experts to address challenges posed by generative AI, promote online content moderation, and engage young professionals through webinars and workshops.

Learn more and apply here.

The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Training – CEPOL, hosted a webinar on Wednesday dedicated to understanding and countering the role that artificial intelligence plays in the spread of online antisemitism. Alongside the four speakers was TecHRI’s Projects and Partnerships Manager Marija Ljubinkovic, who shared the Institute’s work on antisemitism and Holocaust distortion and denial. Her presentation, focusing on understanding AI tools – both the risks and their potential for combating antisemitism online, also shared insights from TecHRI’s recent work with major social media platforms. 

The webinar, designed to equip law enforcement officials with the ability to recognize and combat antisemitism, referenced TecHRI’s most recent project, Human vs. AI to demonstrate AI chatbots’ ability to understand online hate as humans do. The study showed that generative AI chatbots can detect, flag, and even preemptively redirect harmful content, with the aim of training the chatbots to mirror human monitors.

Ljubinkovic emphasized AI’s potential harmful role such as when leveraged for the creation of hateful chatbots which were introduced on Gab in 2024. She also invited the participants to read the Fighting Online Antisemitism (FOA) report published in March in partnership with TecHRI, which focuses on the threats of Gab’s unregulated social media space.

Executive Director of WJC's Institute for Technology and Human Rights, Yfat Barak-Cheney, spoke at the UN in Geneva during the 3rd Global Dialogue on AI - "AI for #OneHumanity - Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence" hosted by the UN Alliance of Civilizations. As part of the panel on AI and Media in the Information Age: Combatting AI-Driven Disinformation, Misinformation, and Hate Speech, Barak-Cheney flagged the challenges AI poses to hate speech and antisemitism and presented the case study of Holocaust Denial and Distortion.

Referring to the research by UNESCO and the World Jewish Congress AI and the Holocaust: Rewriting History? she emphasized that when AI can generate hallucinated events like the ‘Holocaust by drowning,’ or fabricate survivor testimony, it not just questions the Holocaust but leads to the liar’s dividend — the idea that if anything can be faked, then even truth is suspect." This erosion of trust affects all historical memory — and all communities at risk.”

Barak-Cheney also noted positive aspects of AI, through the Human vs AI project, where WJC compared how two leading AI models — ChatGPT and Claude — analyze real antisemitic hate speech, drawn from actual social media experiences of Jewish users. "In this research we learned that the chatbots identified correctly antisemitic comments, including recognizing many antisemitic tropes — even subtle ones. This shows the vast potential to use Generative AI to moderate hateful speech online. 

When asked about best practices the WJC is working on, Barak-Cheney presented search redirect interventions with Meta and TikTok which intend to promote verified sources on the platforms on the Holocaust. "Supporting AI literacy for everyone - from children to adults is key to ensuring AI continues to serve all humanity" she concluded.

NEW YORK – Fighting Online Antisemitism (FOA), with the support of the World Jewish Congress, released a report today revealing how the extremist-friendly social network Gab and its AI chatbots have incubated and spread virulent antisemitic rhetoric and content. 

The report finds that Gab’s laissez-faire approach to moderation turned the platform into a breeding ground for anti-Jewish hate speech and conspiracy theories, which then amplifies extremist ideologies and even inspire real-world violence. The findings sound an alarm that urgent action is needed to curb online antisemitism before it translates into further harm offline.

Gab, founded in 2016 as an alternative social media platform promoting itself as a “home for free speech,” has attracted significant criticism due to its intentional lack of moderation regarding hate speech, notably antisemitism. The report reveals that Gab explicitly refuses to monitor or moderate hate speech content, citing protection under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Read the full article here.