CCDH Exaggerates Threat of Hate Speech Online
The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s (CCDH) recent report states that 4chan members spread “AI Jew memes” on X, using 43 different images and reaching a total of 2.2 million views. Examples of AI-generated antisemitic images on X included “Taylor Swift in a Nazi officer’s uniform sliding a Jewish man into an oven.” The most widely shared post was allegedly “Pixar’s Nazi Germany,” which showed “a montage of four AI-generated scenes from an imaginary animated movie, depicting smiling Nazis running concentration camps and leading Jewish children and adults into gas chambers.”
The Washington Post echoed the study, arguing the platform X “has emerged as a conduit to mainstream exposure for a fresh wave of automated hate memes, generated using cutting-edge AI image tools by trolls on the notorious online forum 4chan.”
However, CCDH concedes that some of these images were also found on TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, and Facebook. Specifically, The Post and CCDH say that of the 66 incidents of antisemitic AI images, only 3 were actioned by X even though they were reported and appear to violate the platform’s policy against hateful conduct. CCDH says that it focused on X because of its belief that the platform under Musk is “a particularly hospitable environment for explicitly hateful content to reach a wider audience.” This is an admission that CCDH’s methods were not unbiased, and that the group assumed a conclusion before it even began conducting its research.
But neither CCDH nor the Washington Post shared the data from the report so that it could be independently verified. Until the full data is made available, we cannot see the actual posts in question and confirm that they were serious instances of real hate, as opposed to other types of speech.
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