By VERED ANDRE’EV, OMAR MOHAMMED, LARA PORTNOY

Often referred to as the “world’s oldest hatred”, antisemitism, Jew-hatred, or Judeophobia has led to mass expulsions, pogroms, massacres, and the largest genocide in human history – the Holocaust. Hatred against the Jewish people can be traced across history and geography, evolving with global events, trends, and local cultures. Today, antisemitism is experiencing a worldwide revival, with the events of October 7th, 2023, and the resulting Israel-Hamas war serving as an impetus to major spikes in hateful rhetoric and violent action. Antisemitic incidents were already at historic highs; they have increased further. Antisemitism is an issue of serious concern that requires public attention and policy response. As stated in November 2022 by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), “antisemitic incidents and hate crimes violate fundamental rights, especially the right to human dignity, the right to equality of treatment and the freedom of thought, conscience and religion”. According to the Anti-Defamation League’s Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2023, “In 2023, ADL tabulated 8,873 antisemitic incidents across the United States. This represents a 140% increase from the 3,698 incidents recorded in 2022 and is the highest number on record since ADL began tracking antisemitic incidents in 1979.” When assessing antisemitism in Arabic-speaking countries, the situation is even more disturbing. The ADL’s Global 100 survey, first launched in 2014, measures antisemitic beliefs across 100 countries, revealing notably high levels in Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), with index scores reaching 74% in Saudi Arabia and 93% in the West Bank and Gaza (Weiberg, 2020). Antisemitism in the Arab world has deep historical roots, intensified by figures like Muhammad Rashid Rida in the early 20th century, who used antisemitic rhetoric in response to political Zionism. This hatred has been embedded in Arab political discourse for over a century, often framed in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, where conspiracy theories portray Jews as a global malevolent force. Islamist movements, emerging in the 1920s, have perpetuated these antisemitic views, depicting Jews as historical enemies and untrustworthy partners in peace. The legacy of antisemitism includes influential texts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which were widely disseminated in the Arab world and continue to influence perceptions today (Winter & Link, 2024).

Washington, DC: Program on Extremism at George Washington University , 2025. 35p.

By Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society

This report focusses on the impacts of social media and Australian society. It examines the influence of social media on users' health and wellbeing, particularly on vulnerable cohorts of people, but also how social media can provide users with positive connection, a sense of community, a place for expression and instant access to information and entertainment.

The Committee heard that balancing these conflicting realities is a wicked problem.

The report addresses both the need for immediate action, and the need for a sustained digital reform agenda. It supports protecting Australians through a statutory duty of care by digital platforms, education support and digital competency, greater protections of personal information, independent research, data gathering and reporting, and giving users greater control over what they see on social media.

This report puts Big Tech on notice—social media companies are not immune from the need to have a social licence to operate.

Recommendations for the Australian Government

1. Consider options for greater enforceability of Australian laws for social media platforms.

2. Introduce a single and overarching statutory duty of care onto digital platforms for the wellbeing of their Australian users.

3. Introduce legislative provisions to enable effective, mandatory data access for independent researchers and public interest organisations, and an auditing process by appropriate regulators.

4. As part of its regulatory framework, ensures that social media platforms introduce measures that allow users greater control over what user-generated content and paid content they see by having the ability to alter, reset, or turn off their personal algorithms and recommender systems.

5. Prioritise proposals from the Privacy Act review relating to greater protections for the personal information of Australians and children.

6. Any features of the Australian Government's regulatory framework that will affect young people be codesigned with young people.

7. Support research and data gathering regarding the impact of social media on health and wellbeing to build on the evidence base for policy development.

8. One of the roles of the previously recommended Digital Affairs Ministry should be to develop, coordinate and manage funding allocated for education to enhance digital competency and online safety skills.

9. Reports to both Houses of Parliament the results of its age assurance trial.

10. Industry be required to incorporate safety by design principles in all current and future platform technology.

11. Introduce legislative provisions requiring social media platforms to have a transparent complaints mechanism.

12. Ensures adequate resourcing for the Office of the eSafety Commissioner to discharge its evolving functions.

Parliament of Australia, 18 NOV 2024

By Noor Huda Ismail

Online radicalization is a complex issue characterized by the different roles of digital propagandists and potential perpetrators, as highlighted by the recent security threats surrounding the Pope's visit to Indonesia. To combat this threat effectively, we need to prioritize real-time monitoring and interdisciplinary collaboration, utilizing AI tools to analyze and mitigate extremist content while advocating targeted interventions instead of punitive measures. Addressing radicalization necessitates collective societal action and a significant investment of relevant resources.

S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, NTU Singapore, 2024. 4p.

 Edited by Joseph B. Walther and Ronald E. Rice

This book explores the social forces among and between online aggressors that affect the expression and perpetration of online hate. Its chapters illustrate how patterns of interactive social behavior reinforce, magnify, or modify this expression. It also considers the characteristics of social media that facilitate social interactions that promote hate and facilitate relationships among haters. Bringing together a range of international experts and covering an array of themes, including woman abuse, antisemitism, pornography, radicalization, and extreme political youth movements, this book examines the specific social factors and processes that facilitate these forms of hate and proposes new approaches for explaining them. Cutting-edge, interdisciplinary, and authoritative, this book will be of interest to sociologists, criminologists, and scholars of media, communication, and computational social science alike, as well as those engaged with hate crime, hate speech, social media, and online social networks.

London; New York: Routledge, 2025.

By  Nina Tvede Korshøj  , Thomas Friis Søgaard

Research exploring online-mediated drug dealing has gained momentum in recent years. Much existing research is characterized by a primary focus on the “online” aspects of drug sales facilitated by social media, resulting in a divide between “on”- and “offline” drug dealing. We wish to bridge this gap, by focusing on the hybridity of dealing drugs via social media and by arguing for a more holistic understanding of contemporary drug dealing. Methods: This article is based on in-depth digitally facilitated oral interviews with 25 individuals with experience in dealing drugs via social media platforms and encrypted messaging apps and on observational data from different apps and platforms. Results: We found that many sellers start by dealing offline and gradually drift into sales using social media technology. While the internet offers drug sellers new opportunities to expand their business, many sellers are not technological exclusionists but rather adopt a multichannel approach where they sell both via social media and occasionally or regularly also through in-person and technologically analog means. Additionally, many sellers do not draw clear-cut distinctions between whether they use social media, SMS, or encrypted apps, but rather see their “drug sales phone” as one medium for all sales-related communication. Findings also show that local offline power dynamics continue to influence sellers’ ability to build and expand their online business and that offline as well as online networks play a crucial role in sellers’ hiring of helpers and their bulk drug sourcing. Conclusion: We discuss how our findings have analytical, conceptual, and methodological implications for the development of a more nuanced and holistic approach in the study of drug sales involving online technologies. 

International Journal of Drug Policy. Volume 130, August 2024, 104509

By Mark Tunick

In an age of smartphones, Facebook and YouTube, privacy may seem to be a norm of the past. This book addresses ethical and legal questions that arise when media technologies are used to give individuals unwanted attention. Drawing from a broad range of cases within the US, UK, Australia, Europe, and elsewhere, Mark Tunick asks whether privacy interests can ever be weightier than society’s interest in free speech and access to information. Taking a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, and drawing on the work of political theorist Jeremy Waldron concerning toleration, the book argues that we can still have a legitimate interest in controlling the extent to which information about us is disseminated. The book begins by exploring why privacy and free speech are valuable, before developing a framework for weighing these conflicting values.　By taking up key cases in the US and Europe, and the debate about a ‘right to be forgotten’, Tunick discusses the potential costs of limiting free speech, and points to legal remedies and other ways to develop new social attitudes to privacy in an age of instant information sharing. This book will be of great interest to students of privacy law, legal ethics, internet governance and media law in general.

Abington, Oxon, UK; New York: Routledge, 2015. 229p.

By International Crisis Group

What’s new? Mexico’s criminal groups use social media to garner popular support, denigrate rivals, glorify narco-culture and coordinate violence. Social media is also crucial for providing timely information about flare-ups of violence, particularly since journalists face major threats to their safety, which heavily circumscribes their ability to report from many crime-affected municipalities.

Why does it matter? These criminal groups are recruiting and spreading disinformation online, making them stronger and creating a glut of unverified information that puts civilians at greater risk. Platforms have struggled to respond appropriately.

What should be done? Platforms should boost resources for online monitoring, especially when violence is spiking. Given social media’s importance in disseminating information, platforms should modify their algorithms to demote posts supporting criminal groups and work with civil society to identify trusted accounts, including anonymous ones. Mexico’s government should also invest in protecting journalists.

Brussels: Crisis Group, 2024

By Gina Bou Serhal, Kristian Alexander and Rahaf Alkhazraji

This issue brief delves into the changing landscape of Italian organized crime, focusing on the ‘Ndrangheta, a potent criminal group originating from Calabria. It explores how the ‘Ndrangheta has diversified its criminal activities, including drug trafficking and environmental crimes, and its alleged connections with international criminal and terrorist organizations. The brief also sheds light on the emergence of the youthful “Baby Mafia,” or Camorra in Naples, known for its decentralized structure and social media presence glamorizing criminal life. It emphasizes Italy’s efforts to combat organized crime and the necessity for a united European approach to address the mafia’s global influence and adaptability across borders.

Stockholm: Institute for Security and Development Policy, 2023. 6p.

By Laure de Batza and Evžen Kočendab

We provide the first quantitative synthesis of the literature on how financial markets react to the disclosure of financial crimes committed by listed firms. While consensus expects negative stock price returns, the exact size of the effect is far from clear. We surveyed 111 studies published over three decades, from which we collected 480 estimates from event studies. Then, we perform a thorough meta-analysis based on the most recent available techniques. We show that the negative abnormal returns found in the literature seem to be exaggerated by more than three times. Hence, the “punishment” effect, including a reputational penalty, suffers from a serious publication bias. After controlling for this bias, negative abnormal returns suggest the existence of an informational effect. We also document that accounting frauds, crimes committed in common-law countries such as the United States, and allegations are particularly severely sanctioned by financial markets, while the information channels and types of procedures do not influence market reactions.

Munich : Munich Society for the Promotion of Economic Research - CESifo, 2023. 82p.

By Liz McCulloch and Scarlett Furlong

In this report, Volteface aims to bridge the gap in understanding of how social media is being used as a marketplace for illicit drugs and the impact this is having on young people – social media’s primary user group. This report examines how prevalent this phenomenon is, which platforms are most likely to host this activity, what drugs are being advertised, how the platforms are being used, and what impact this is having on young people’s wellbeing, as well as the challenges facing social media regulators and law enforcement.   

London: Volteface, 2019. 87p.

By Jakob Demant and Silje A. Bakken

Use of the internet has changed drug dealing over the past decade. While there is a growing understanding of the role of darknet drug markets, little is known about how drug dealing works on public online services such as social media. This study reports findings from a Nordic comparative study of social media drug dealing, which represents the first in-depth study of increasing levels of digitally mediated drug dealing outside cryptomarkets.

Lisbon, Portugal: European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA)m 2019. 22p.