The anti-Semitism algorithm

The White House argues that it is committed to stamping out anti-Semitism in America – on campuses especially. Absent from the discussion, however, are the roles of China, Russia and Iran in fueling Jew-hatred across the US during the height of last year’s student protests and beyond.

Organizations in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran have been secretly supporting protests in New York, waging covert online campaigns and cyberattacks and manipulating algorithms to help make Americans more anti-Semitic and to fan discord and violence. These dictatorial regimes have no genuine interest in the rights of any victims in the Middle East. Despite their supposed support of Palestinians, Russia and China have slaughtered and oppressed Muslims when it suits them in Chechnya, Crimea and Xinjiang. But they are united in cynically exploiting anti-Semitism to undermine the country they see as their main enemy: the US.

“Zionism is an organic part of the international – primarily American – imperialist machinery for the carrying out of neo-colonialist policies” sounds like a claim from a recent campus protest. But it’s actually taken from a 1970 edition of the British Soviet Weekly, one of thousands of front publications the Soviet Union supported during the Cold War to develop tropes which are now commonplace.

Since October 7, the daily average of ‘violent messages mentioning Jews and Israel’ on Telegram rose tenfold

“It is no exaggeration to say that almost all of the tropes in current circulation – that Zionism is racism, that Zionism is Nazism, that Israel is based on apartheid, white supremacy, ethnic cleansing and genocide – were created by Soviet spin doctors,” writes Jake Wallis Simons, a former editor of Britain’s Jewish Chronicle newspaper. The Soviets, in turn, were building on Czarist anti-Semitic propaganda. The Czarist secret police produced The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a 1930s forgery that purported to reveal a secret Jewish plot to take over the world. Today the Kremlin works through online forgeries – duplicitous accounts and publications that may look American at first glance, but are really run from Russia. One Russian covert campaign used AI to generate fake online personas that promote fake versions of western media, such as Fox News, to claim that the Gaza war was causing rising energy costs, making Israel the scapegoat for higher oil prices.

Another fake campaign mimicked well-known investigative outlets such as Bellingcat and the BBC to claim that a US-made Israeli missile was responsible for a deadly explosion at the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza in the first weeks of the war. The horrific bombing became a rallying cry at protests – about 500 people sheltering at the hospital were killed. But even Human Rights Watch, an organization well-known for criticizing Israel, says a misfired Palestinian rocket was the most likely explanation. Meanwhile, an investigation by the Washington Post last June showed how Russia and Iran were both funding the Grayzone, an American conspiracy outlet that pushes anti-Israel and pro-Russia propaganda to a combined social media audience of 700,000 people – including the claim that Israel was responsible for the deaths of many of its own citizens in the October 7 attacks.

Part of the obvious problem with covert campaigns is that researchers always struggle with attribution. So the confirmed Russian activity is only a snapshot of the larger picture. Since October 7, the daily average of “violent messages mentioning Jews and Israel” on Telegram, a messaging platform owned by the Russian tech tycoon Pavel Durov, increased by a factor of ten. In a single day after the Hamas-Israel conflict began, roughly one in four accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X posting about the conflict appeared to be fake, according to Cyabra, a social media intelligence company based in Tel Aviv. This amplification has the hallmarks of various Russian campaigns, but to make a final call on who is behind it is incredibly difficult.

The same goes for cyberattacks. Since October 7, 2023, hacking groups that seem independent have been attacking targets in Israel, the US and Europe to help Hamas. Two hacking groups, Anonymous Sudan and SiegedSec, took responsibility for an attack on Israeli industrial systems that support aviation in the country on October 12.

The most ‘popular’ narrative is Holocaust denial: one post mocking a victim gained 233,000 views

In early February last year, Anonymous Sudan hacked into the systems of one of LA’s largest hospitals, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, crippling its online services. The hackers posted on Telegram: “Bomb hospitals in Gaza, we shut down yours too, eye for eye…” Anonymous Sudan is known to share logistics and techniques employed by Russian hackers, which leads analysts to believe the group is funded and supported by Russia. Hackers connected to the Iranian regime have also broken into water utility plants in Pennsylvania, allegedly because the plants use Israeli technology. Meanwhile, cyber-attacks on Holocaust education sites rose by 872 per cent in 2023, according to IT company Cloudflare.

But while Russia and Iran are past masters at exploiting anti-Zionism and fueling anti-Semitism, China is also joining in. Tuvia Gering, a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel, has been tracking anti-Semitic clichés in Chinese media. To quote just a few examples,  on October 10, just three days after Hamas’s attack, an article on state-run China Central Television (CCTV) argued that, “Jews, who account for 3 percent of the US population, manipulate and control 70 percent of the country’s wealth.” It went on to claim that the US presidential candidates’ obeisance to Jewish capital explained the Biden administration’s unwavering support for Israel. Wu Sike, China’s former special envoy to the Middle East and ambassador to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, agreed that “the Jewish bloc’s influence is clear to all.” Su Lin, host of Green China Network Television and an award-winning Chinese influencer, stated: “Hamas went too soft on Israel. Isn’t Israel today a Jewish version of the Nazis?”

Other Chinese activities were aimed directly at the US. One covert Chinese influence campaign known as Spamouflage, which was first linked to an arm of China’s Ministry of Public Security in 2019, reposted messages by a prominent pro-Palestinian organization in New York City calling on protesters to “flood the encampments” at the city’s universities.

Other Beijing-based actors took a more active role, funding and directing the protests. At the heart of this was Neville Roy Singham, an American tech billionaire who has been supporting some of the most anti-Semitic protests across the US. According to the Network Contagion Research Institute, a New Jersey-based digital research group, Singham “lives and works in Shanghai, where he shares premises with Shanghai Maku Cultural Communications Ltd., a Chinese propaganda firm focused on presenting a positive image of the People’s Republic of China to the global south.”

Singham finances a wide range of nonprofits, alternative media outlets and donor organizations that have been disseminating CCP-supported agendas and narratives in the US since at least 2017. According to a New York Times investigation, at least $275 million has been funneled through US nonprofits to various far-left groups. The most notable among them is a part of the Shut it Down 4 Palestine Coalition (SID4P), which includes the People’s Forum, which helped to organize several anti-Israel protests on October 8 that both Republicans and Democrats denounced as anti-Semitic: they featured Nazi flags and calls to “smash the settler Zionist state.”

Singham’s funding choices are said to be informed by his wife, former Democratic operative Jodie Evans. As leader of the far-left activist group Code Pink, Evans steered the organization’s message toward lionizing China as “a defender of the oppressed and a model for economic growth without slavery or war.” Code Pink excused the attack by Hamas and supported demands to stop US support for Ukraine. On June 20 last year, Code Pink organized a protest that turned violent at the Adas Torah synagogue in LA, which Joe Biden, who was then president, and other senior politicians condemned as anti-Semitic.

But perhaps the most effective tool of Chinese influence is the CCP’s dominance over TikTok, which has more than 150 million users in the US. According to research by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, among all the marginalized groups on TikTok, Jews face the largest amount of hateful content. The most “popular” anti-Semitic trope is Holocaust denial: one post mocking victims of the Holocaust gained 233,000 views. In January 2024, TikTok’s top government-relations professional in Israel, Barak Herscowitz, noticed that the platform didn’t allow campaigns to raise awareness about Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas because it was deemed “political” by the company, but allowed many pro-Palestinian campaigns that had very graphic images.

At the same time, the platform received complaints from Israeli content creators that their posts were being suppressed. After facing the unwillingness of the leadership to address the issue, Herscowitz resigned in protest. In 2023, the Washington Post published an exclusive interview where Zen Goziker, a former risk manager at TikTok, shared his concerns that the company’s plan for protecting US user data is deeply flawed and ineffective. His numerous meetings with Congress and journalists in Washington, DC, were followed by a five-hour Congressional hearing with the CEO of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, and a subsequent bipartisan bill forcing TikTok to sell the company or face a ban in the US.

You can’t have an informed debate on anti-Semitism if you cannot see what forces are behind what users consume

Russia, China and Iran may not be the cause of anti-Semitism in the US, but the way they manipulate the issue means you can’t have a full, free and informed debate on the topic. If Americans are to have any chance of a meaningful national conversation they need to be able to understand who is pushing messages on it and why, and how algorithms are shaping the conversation. First, the government should be much more confident about telling the public what they know about sneaky foreign interventions. The Biden administration was frustratingly meek in calling them out. It tended to play down the role of cyberattacks and only indicted Anonymous Sudan last October. At other times the government has been frustratingly opaque. On July 9 last year, Avril Haines, then director of national intelligence, said: “Iranian government actors have sought to opportunistically take advantage of ongoing protests regarding the war in Gaza, using a playbook we’ve seen other actors use over the years. We have observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters… Americans who are being targeted by this Iranian campaign may not be aware that they are interacting with or receiving support from a foreign government.” This was intriguing, but low on detail. How many people were taken in? On what platforms? This sort of half-reveal increases the sense of living in a murky, manipulative world and erodes trust.

But it’s not just individual campaigns that need unmasking, it’s the vast social-media engineering that structures how we all communicate. At the time of writing, it looks as though Donald Trump will not ban TikTok, instead handing it over to a US owner. Whoever that ends up being should make clear who is behind content on the site, and how the algorithms decide who sees what. You can’t have an informed debate on the rise of anti-Semitism if you cannot see what forces are behind it, when you can’t tell whether the rise of a topic is organic, or what content is being promoted over others by online algorithms and what is being suppressed.

The heads of social media companies like to claim they are heroes of free speech. But free speech is not only about the right to express yourself, it’s also about the right to receive information, and that includes transparency about how the computer programs which have come to dominate the public square engineer our reality.

Currently all this is in the dark, making people feel they are being manipulated by mysterious forces, which contributes to the conspiratorial thinking that creates the psychological ground where anti-Semitism has always flourished.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.