Wednesday, December 31, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
What caused this escalation? And why do we see the same pattern repeating elsewhere?
The answer is not primarily ideological. It is structural.
What we are witnessing online is not simply the spread of antisemitic beliefs. It is the conditioning of antisemitic behavior through incentive structures that reward certain forms of moral expression and punish others.
A growing body of research shows that social media platforms shape expression through operant conditioning. Likes, shares, praise, and visibility function as rewards. Content that triggers these responses becomes more frequent; content that does not fades away. Crucially, changes in expression often precede changes in belief. People are rewarded for more extreme statements, which nudges them toward further extremism. The moral justifications come later.
This dynamic is especially pronounced for moralized content. Studies have shown that when users receive positive feedback for expressions of moral outrage, they become more outraged over time. The reward trains the behavior; cognition follows.
Influencers are not immune to this process. On the contrary, they are especially vulnerable to it. Their livelihoods, reputations, and sense of relevance are tightly coupled to engagement metrics. When certain framings consistently perform better – when posts attract attention, donations, invitations, and validation – those framings are interpreted not merely as effective, but as correct.
Moral language then arrives afterward, as justification. The sequence is backward: reward first, reasoning second.
By most definitions, I am an influencer. I have over 130,000 followers across platforms. I recognize the pull of the dopamine rush when a post goes viral. I see how simplification often produces more engagement than nuance. That pull is real and, if indulged, addictive.
For those whose income or status depends on their online persona, the pressure is far stronger. Ratings, likes, and retweets begin to matter more than accuracy or fairness. This dynamic exists independently of political ideology.
Outside funders like Qatar and Russia recognize the dynamic and supercharge the reward system for those who are judged most likely to help their own political agendas. The influencers, hungry for money and increased reach, might pretend that they have not changed their positions but the cycle of rewards between them and their funders is irresistible.
Still, no conditioning system operates in a vacuum. For this process to take hold, there must be a pre-existing substrate – a baseline of latent antisemitic belief sufficient to generate initial reactions.
This does not require a majority. It does not even require widespread explicit prejudice. A small, reliable, and noisy minority is enough, provided their responses are predictable. Engagement systems do not measure representativeness; they measure reaction. Once a critical threshold is crossed, algorithms amplify, influencers adapt, and peripheral participants take notice.
Every society contains a persistent minority that holds antisemitic views or is receptive to antisemitic framing. That group supplies the initial engagement that tells the system: this content works. And because influencers are trained by feedback, those responders end up influencing the influencers.
Antisemitism is unusually well suited to this threshold activation because it is historically entrenched, can be weaponized from an and every political perspective, and easily framed in terms of power, conspiracy, or righteousness. The initial responders do not need to be persuaded. They only need to recognize something that already resonates.
Once that first wave reacts, the system treats engagement as legitimacy. What began as a minority response is reinterpreted as consensus.
This is not a new phenomenon. Long before social media, political institutions and activist movements understood that a small number of highly motivated actors – letter writers, callers, emailers – exert disproportionate influence. Their voices are louder, more persistent, and easier to count than the silence of the unmotivated majority.
Digital platforms dramatically intensify this effect. Comments, replies, quote-posts, and donations are all visible signals. A relatively small number of users can create the appearance of overwhelming agreement or urgency. The social media companies are designed around increasing engagement, and they dutifully reward hate by promoting similar content from others. Influencers, institutions, and journalists routinely mistake this activity for representative public opinion. Over time, this feedback loop can indeed shape that public opinion.
Silence, meanwhile, is misread as consent.
Influencers are not operating in isolation. What emerges instead is a fractal pattern. The system does not merely transmit beliefs downward; it reproduces incentive-driven behavior at every level of participation.
At the top are influencers. They respond to engagement metrics, funding, and access. Framing shifts incrementally toward what performs best: sharper claims, greater moral certainty, less tolerance for dissent.
Below them are secondary nodes – commenters, amplifiers, quote-posters. Their rewards are smaller but structurally identical: likes on comments, replies from high-status accounts, increased visibility. Extremism becomes a signaling device. The more uncompromising the posture, the greater the chance of recognition.
Below that are peripheral participants who affiliate through association. They may not generate content themselves, but they experience participation as moral belonging. Aligning with popular spreaders feels like joining something larger than oneself. Identity replaces judgment. Latent antisemitic attitudes that might have been shameful become justified by others repeating it.
At every scale, the incentives point in the same direction.
Other forms of prejudice can also be amplified by digital incentives, but antisemitism is unusually efficient within this system. It is often framed as a critique of power rather than hostility toward a minority. It compresses complex historical and ethical questions into simple moral binaries that travel well in outrage-driven formats. These features lower the activation threshold and raise the reward ceiling, making antisemitic framing disproportionately competitive in attention-based environments.
Once activated, the system closes into a feedback loop. Initial engagement leads to amplification. Amplification normalizes the framing. Normalization raises the baseline. Participants compete in outrage. Each iteration makes previous positions appear timid or insufficient.
Crucially, this process does not require that most participants hold antisemitic beliefs. It requires only that they reproduce antisemitic framings. The system converts many people not into antisemites, but into antisemitism-adjacent amplifiers.
And that is often enough.
This is not a failure of education or intent. It is a systems problem.
In such systems, antisemitism is not believed because it is true. It is believed because it spreads. And the cards are stacked against the truth.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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