Distort,post,repeat: Laundering antisemitism on “cliquey networks” during COVID-19

Abstract

Today, in the age of the internet, during recent epidemics such as H1N1, Ebola and Covid-19, it is striking to see how old accusatory scripts are circulated and perpetuated via social media, which serve as new channels for discrimination and blame directed at traditional figures who have been scapegoated at different moments in the history of European epidemics. The article shows how the laundering of information into a cliquey network takes empirical shape during a health crisis. We do so by focusing on VKontakte, a Russian social network similar to Facebook and the 15th largest website in the world in terms of traffic. Using an ethnographic approach to social media, we show how borderline information from an open and easily accessible website is reappropriated, made explicit, and transformed into legally prohibited hate content. It also documents the ability of conspiracy theorists to use the full range of discourse production channels in a country-in this case France-that has very strict laws on hate speech, including that published on social networks. These laws are circumvented by anti-Semitic communities that spread false information in marginal, open and legal networks, thus avoiding legal proceedings.

Keywords

anti-semitism Covid-19 information laundering social media pandemic

Introduction

Today, in the age of the Internet, during recent epidemics such as H1N1, Ebola, and COVID-19, it is striking to see how old accusatory scripts are circulated and perpetuated via social media, which serve as new channels for discrimination and blame directed at traditional figures, such as Jews. Rousseau et al. (2015) have shown how the use of social media during the H1N1 outbreak in France enabled what they called the “laundering” of antisemitic information that might otherwise have stayed in the grey zone of obscure and underground blogs to escape censorship. Information laundering can be broadly defined as the process by which information is transformed into hate speech. In this article, we analyse how recurrent antisemitic discourse is “laundered” on fringe social networks during COVID-19 and how what we call “borderline information” is transformed into explicit hate speech.¹ Borderline information is any discourse that is not explicitly hateful but can easily be used, interpreted, or reinterpreted to reiterate sociocultural discriminations. This notion is inspired, namely, by studies on “new racism”, which have shown the renewal of racist discourses through socially-adapted and less explicitly violent logics, which facilitate, naturalise or rationalise inequality and racial differentiation based, for example, on cultural differences (Barker, 1981), meritocratic arguments (Singh, 2018; Vala, 2009) or sanitary/hygienic discourses (Desmarais et al., 2023). In the field of epidemics, Joffe (2011) speaks of a growing critical “reflexivity” regarding othering in times of contagion, which is accompanied by political and social initiatives to alleviate exclusion. We postulate, following the conclusions of Atlani-Duault et al. (2015), that this “work” does not lead to the elimination of scapegoating and othering, but rather to the renewal of discrimination, which, when socially rejected, becomes (re)deployed via coded and “underground” logics. In this perspective, “borderline information” can be understood as information that borders the limit set by the law of what can circulate in the public sphere, including on the Internet.

Our article, situated within a growing literature on the relation between social dynamics, cultural contexts, and psychopathology in radicalisation to violent extremism, including antisemitism (Hassan et al., 2019; Kirmayer, 2019; Moffic et al., 2020; Rosen et al., 2018) will study 1) antisemitic narratives and the strategic use of crisis events, such as epidemics, to reiterate antisemitic discourses; and 2) the technical strategies used by antisemitic groups to efficiently propagate antisemitic frames, namely via social media and through what is often called an “infodemics” (World Health Organization [WHO, 2021]). We do so by focusing more specifically on the role of “cliquey networks”—in this case the Russian-based VKontakte (VK)²—by cliquey network, we mean a private community where individuals know each other, recognise each other, quote one another and maintain a common language and renewal of antisemitic codes, fostering a kind of echo chamber.

Accordingly, while this article shows the timelessness of antisemitic discourse over the history of epidemics, it contributes to current literature by documenting the ability of antisemites to use the complete range of discourse production channels in a country—France in this case—which has very strict laws on hate speech, including regulations on social networks,³ aligned with recent stringent measures in European legislation.⁴ As we show, these laws are circumvented by antisemitic communities, who re-circulate false information in marginal and open networks, while avoiding legal proceedings. We argue that patterns of disinformation operate within “cliquey networks” that organise to distort, post, and repeat hate speech.

Literature review

The recurrence of “the Jew” as a “figure of blame” (Atlani-Duault & Kendall, 2009; Atlani-Duault et al., 2015, 2020) in accusatory narratives of epidemics has a long history (Cohn, 2007, 2012; Markel, 1995, 2005; Ritzmann, 1998; Snel & van Straten, 2018). Old patterns of antisemitic expression during epidemics continue today, particularly in three forms. The first, linked to the re-enactment of Jesus's suffering and death, charges that Jews have killed Christian children to obtain their blood, turning ritual murder into “blood libel” (Teter, 2020). The second suggests that Jews conspire to dominate the world. This is generally presented in the stereotypical figure of the money-lending Jew as a “vicious usurer” (Chazan, 1997; Cluse, 2004). The third connects Jews with the spread of disease. In Europe, the first and main historical reference to this is to the Black Death or bubonic plague, which devastated Europe in 1348 and 1349 (Cohn, 2007, 2012; Ritzmann, 1998).

Digital networks represent an opportunity for certain groups to open a space for political agitation and give visibility to militant statements and actions (Blondeau & Allard, 2007; Caiani et al., 2012; Gimenez & Voirol, 2017). This choice of strategy is notably in line with that of the American and European “radical right” or “extreme right” groups, which very early on chose to rely on the Internet as their main instrument of recruitment and organisation (Caiani & Parenti, 2013; Conway et al., 2019). In our survey, it is the antisemitic users themselves who identified with the extreme right through their stories, images, vocabulary, and their support for certain political figures.

The radical right and antisemitic movements overlap in their use of social networks that have been termed alternative, underground, “dark” (Zeng & Schäfer, 2021), or “vernacular” (de Zeeuw & Tuters, 2020), such as 4chan, Reddit, Gab, 8chan and Endchan. These marginal platforms have become a prime source of material for studying social groupings that are looking for greater visibility and more freedom of speech and action (Froio, 2017; MacFarquhar, 2020). The studies show that marginal social networks play a crucial role in the circulation of different types of “fake” or “junk” news (Hagen & Jokubauskaite, 2020; Venturini, 2019); at the same time, they indicate that disinformation and hate speech that start on marginal platforms serve as “echo chambers” (Gonimah, 2018; Philips, 2018; Quattrociocchi et al., 2016) which amplify violent views and can “migrate” to more mainstream platforms (Woolley et al., 2019). Fringe social networks are thus a gateway for understanding the discourse of certain political milieux, in particular those espousing antisemitism (Ong & Pantucci, 2020; Ozalp et al., 2020).

Research objectives

This article is interested in how antisemitic information moves from open websites to cliquey social networks in a way that allows it to evade anti-racist legislation. It focuses on the relationship between an alternative social network and the management of hate and misinformation content. By analysing online laundering practices, we aim to understand how opinion leaders in France's antisemitic/conspiracy theory milieux use VK to deliver legally prohibited hate speech while escaping censorship and prosecution.

Methodology

To approach the circulation of information between websites and the cliquey social network, we first focused on one of the best-known websites among extreme right-wing and conspiracy theory social networks, namely due to its weak management of hate speech⁵: we will refer to this site, which we have anonymised, as FranceRight.com.⁶ This “permissiveness” has been noted by users of the platform, by organisations fighting against hate speech, and by media outlets denouncing the racism and antisemitism expressed on it.⁷ From the beginning of the pandemic until the end of the lockdown, this site, which concentrates on various conspiracy sources blended with antisemitic purposes, saw its traffic rise from 1 million visits to 4 million per month.⁸ Our methodological choice involved tracking the most prominent users discussing conspiratorial and antisemitic topics to identify the networks from which disinformation was disseminated. We focused on the interaction between emerging fringe platforms, FranceRight.com, and fringe social networks (VK), to understand the new strategies for disseminating hate speech and misinformation.

Noting that FranceRight.com readers frequently recommended sharing material on VK, we analysed the link between these two platforms. VK is an equivalent of Facebook, where photos, videos and news comments can be posted, although, unlike Facebook it has no representation or headquarters in France. It is an open network where explicit antisemitic information freely circulates. It is worth noting that we have not been able to find any evidence of dialogue between the French authorities and VK about regulation on the Internet.⁹ Our analysis focuses on posts by three VK users, their content, and the comments they roused by followers.

Data collection

The first author extracted the study data from the VK interface, using a netnographic approach (Addeo et al., 2019; Kozinets, 2010). To access posts on VK, the first author created an anonymised account and “followed” the users whose publications we wished to view. We used our anonymous profile to “follow” three core users. We chose this trio of users—whom we will call VK Users 1, 2 and 3—because they had two important points in common. First, they were publicly recognised for their antisemitic purposes, either because they had been the subject of court convictions or because their profiles were repeatedly shut down on other social networks. Second, they were very active users, publishing between 5 and 10 posts per day. They all could reach more than a thousand people each time they posted, effectively establishing themselves as opinion leaders. In the context of this study, we extracted the posts published by these “core users” on their own VK page (referred to as a “wall”), as well as their followers’ comments and reactions to these posts.

The first author extracted the data between February 2020, at the first appearance of posts on VK by Users 1, 2 and 3 linking the epidemic with antisemitism, and July 2020, when online moderation began to target the core users, namely following the enactment of the “Avia law” in France against hate speech on social networks, on 24 June. Shortly after, their VK (9 July) accounts were closed due to their violent content.¹⁰ A sample of 249 posts and 1075 comments of content related to antisemitism was extracted from VK. The selected posts were published by one of the three core users, and the collected comments were responses by their followers or by the core users themselves. From this total sample of 1324 items, the first author manually filtered out 403 comments that were irrelevant (repetitions, spam, or statements diverging from the topic of antisemitism). A total of 921 items (249 posts and 672 comments) were included in our analysis.

Analysis

To explore the attribution of Jewish responsibility by these VK users, we adopted an inductive thematic analysis approach, often used in exploratory research to understand a group's conceptualisation of a phenomenon and its main concerns (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Vaismoradi et al., 2013). The data was analysed manually by the first author. The coder first read the raw data (VK items) to familiarise himself with the set. Rather than code all the attached texts (articles, or images), an in-depth reading was performed. The second stage of the analysis process condensed the raw data. The comments were initially associated manually with a multiple identification code, using NVivo qualitative analysis software. The third step identified overlapping themes, allowing some to be grouped into a broader thematic category (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Nowell et al., 2017). To do this, the initial codes were manually grouped in NVivo according to their main underlying thematic content. The final step was to refine these five categories to clarify how they interact and relate to each other (Braun & Clarke, 2006).

Results

The study reveals that antisemitic discourse and the treatment of Jews as figures of blame have been updated within a new context—that of COVID-19. This updating can be discerned by 1) following the chronology of the pandemic, showing that the accusatory narrative has focused not on the evolution of the epidemic itself but rather on its management by the French government. 2) This hate speech has been adapted to different platforms’ characteristics, as evidenced by the study of the content published on the VK network. 3) Finally, this flow of information can be best understood if viewed through the conceptual prism of information laundering.

Three stages in the chronology of the pandemic on Vk

We first explored how the Jewish figure is transformed into a villain par excellence, whose putative role in the epidemic is adjusted to fit the evolution of the epidemic's management and of the topics discussed in the public space. Because chronology often describes the updating and application of antisemitic discourses to a new phenomenon, i.e., COVID-19, we identified stages in the core VK users’ understanding over the course of the epidemic—in effect, a counter-narrative of events marked particularly by a shift from generalised distrust of an abstract Jewish community to a targeted hatred of Jewish personalities in France.

Stage 1: A false problem (28 February – 30 March 2020)

This first period was characterised by reaction to government measures that the three VK users characterised as “dictatorial”, and which raised the idea of an abstract Jewish community holding power. The three VK users’ earliest posts relating to Coronavirus appeared between 28 February and 7 March.

During this first week, the French government¹¹ recommended the widespread adoption of barrier measures to reduce the transmission of the virus (Delfraissy et al., 2020). The three VK users ignored these new developments in national health and focused instead on the links between France and Israel. Although online discussions about barrier measures began as soon as the lockdown was imposed, the VK trio did not mention it, and instead concentrated on what they called a Jewish “community”, a term that appears regularly in their remarks. Bringing these figures into the discussion allowed the three users to invoke another danger, “greater” than that of the virus itself. All in all, accusatory discourse in the first phase interpreted the “real” risk of the pandemic not in relation to the number of cases of people affected by the disease or hospitalised, but rather in relation to Jewish public figures, which, depending on the use made of them, amplified or mitigated the perception of the health risk: “Three Jews on whom our lives depend, but it's pure chance!”. The core users spoke very little about the health threat itself, and it is notable that their speeches were contradictory on this subject.

Stage 2: The threat (30 March – end of April 2020)

The weeks following lockdown saw the emergence of heated debates in the media. This period also constituted a change in strategy for the VK trio of users, who moved from making very general accusations about who is “pulling the strings” to applying this framework to specific topics debated in the general media, such as the continued shortage of masks or the disputed effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment. During this period, one principal strategy of rhetorical aggression was observed: insults and delight at the violence against or the death of Jewish public figures.

This escalation of verbal violence showed the efforts of the proponents of antisemitic discourse to hold onto their traditional reference points as the health situation deteriorates. In addition, satisfaction was expressed at the death of a French Jewish figure, as illustrated by the comments directed at Claude Goasguen, former president of the France–Israel parliamentary friendship group, who died of COVID-19 in 2020. Posts included: “For the sissies who often reproach me for my obituaries, I have the right to rejoice in the death of this piece of shit…”. This discursive approach expresses a kind of appeal to justice, as if the virus were attacking the “guilty”. This approach appears twice in posts and about 10 times in comments. There are only three posts in this category, but they generate the most reactions: they generate about 30 comments, while the other posts generate an average of six and five reactions respectively.

Stage 3: The reason for the plot (early May – 14 June 2020)

Towards the end of the lockdown, which was lifted on 11 May, the rhetoric gradually shifted to focusing on other international figures highlighted by the conspiracy theorists. At this point, the antisemitic rhetoric called for criminal charges against French Jewish personalities presented as members of a global network.

On 1 May, VK User 3 shared an article entitled “Covid or not, Western countries remain vassals of Israel”. On the same day, a follower linked to an article entitled “Trump: ‘Wuhan institute caused the pandemic and WHO should be ashamed’”, commenting: “In other words, it was Lévy-Buzyn”.¹² Another authority figure used to legitimise antisemitic rhetoric was the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, whose opposition to confinement was celebrated: “The refusal of confinement is how we judge a patriot from now on!”. A follower reacted to a comment that criticised Bolsonaro for his complacency regarding Zionism: “His ‘Zionism’ is more posturing than anything else, like Trump. It's nothing like our hateful and belligerent anti-French Zionists. Plus, anti-leftist, anti-LGBT and hated by the same people who hate Trump, that's good enough for me. Long live Boisa [sic: Bolsonaro]!” (13 May).

The “good enough for me” exemplifies how the antisemitic discourse is inserted into a wider political movement. It suggests the existence of a “positional Zionism” that is actually antisemitic, which can be endorsed. This is recognisable by certain clues, such as distrust of the LGBT community or of “the left”. This also shows how antisemitic thinking can be entered into a discussion that does not have a Jewish target in mind.

This approach may make the antisemitic VK users’ narrative of the outbreak of the pandemic at first seem inconsistent as its successive accusations develop: first the outbreak is an inconsequential flu, and then it is a large-scale Jewish plan. In YouTube videos shared on VK, Users 1 and 3 commented that COVID-19 was a virus that had mistakenly escaped from Jewish laboratories, but shortly afterwards stated that the situation was something “the Jews” were taking advantage of.

The chronology of the pandemic in France reveals how antisemitic discourse evolved during the first 6 months and how the call for criminal conviction is the ultimate antisemitic expression found at the end of the periods analysed.

Cliquey networks

There are several ways of constructing figures of blame depending on the format of the Internet platforms, for example, a social network or a conspiracy news website. On the latter, articles published included antisemitic accusations; these articles often contain borderline news, as their content marks a less extreme degree of antisemitism, on the threshold of what is legally allowed to publish on the net. The distinguishing feature of the process is the subtle alteration of information to fit an antisemitic narrative. For example, a media article entitled “In Israel, the ultra-Orthodox Minister of Health under fire” was republished in its entirety by the conspiracy site with a rephrased headline: “Israel's contradictions: Rabbi-Minister of Health accused of fostering pandemic”. However, this article with the rephrased title was subsequently posted by a core user on VK, accompanied by the comment “Crazy cult… leading the world to the abyss”. On the conspiracy websites, the accusation against the Jews was restricted to health management or politics, whereas the antisemitic statements on VK took the form of insults or reuse of Nazi references—never mentioned on the conspiracy websites, but very present on VK.

Consequently, the tolerance of antisemitic discourse on VK gave rise to what we call a “cliquey network” that permitted anti-Jewish hate sentiments to be maintained and provoked. The interactions of the three VK users and their followers can be qualified as a cliquey network for three reasons. The first relates to the recognition of personalities who are central to the interpretation of current information. This is seen, for example, in a shared recognition between the three VK users and their followers, who interact directly with each other and share each other's content. The second reason stems from the three VK users’ consistency in their interpretation of antisemitic statements and arguments. A user's reading of an event or content can be a cause for acceptance or ejection from this community. On one occasion, a follower asked one of the core users about Donald Trump's position and support for Israel: “Will he continue to give the 38 billion dollars to Israel? Despite all that”, a question to which the VK User 1 replied “I’m tired of idiots like you, especially on my wall.¹³ Cancelled!” This “cherry-picking” of information on VK shows how opinion leaders select only controversial parts of the news, and how they remove inconsistencies. The final reason relates to shared codes and references. Namely, wordplay was the main way in which the core users expressed their thoughts, as did their followers, and it was through these references that users interacted, agreed and excluded each other.

Thus, this network is “cliquey” not because of entry restrictions to newcomers, but rather because of its management of a community “loyal” to the information mobilised there. This process features the repression of critical comments, as well as the “socialisation” of truncated information from conspiracy news sites. In this sense, “virtual” antisemitism contains both formats, separated by a boundary that acts as a “laundering” mechanism.

Laundering information

In their previous research on the figures of blame online during the H1N1 epidemic in France, Atlani-Duault et al. (2015) analysed what they called the “laundering” of antisemitic accusations in a subtle play between social media and mainstream newspaper articles, to avoid censorship. In the present study, we tested and extended this approach with a study of a marginal social network (VK) to study how, during the COVID-19 pandemic in France, antisemitic information is laundered. In this case, we focused on following an alternative news website that modified information from mainstream sites and injected it into marginal social networks where the level of information censorship was low.

We show how information laundering can be operationalised as the process by which boundary information is retrieved and then transformed into hate speech. We understand laundering to be the circulation of information that first passes through a conspiracy site and then ends up in a marginal social network with a very marked antisemitic discourse that escapes prosecution. This circulation of borderline information to a cliquey network allows us to explore laundering as a process that allows for (1) reinterpreting information to justify discriminatory (antisemitic) accusations, (2) placing it in a network where this discourse circulates “legally” in relation to the policies of the platform while (3) still transgressing (French) legislation.

Reinterpreting information to justify antisemitic accusations

The information circulating from a conspiracy website to VK only displays the interpretation of a text that has been stripped down in advance. The snippet of information that the main users select is often used to answer the same rhetorical questions: Who is funding which lab? Who benefits from this or that event? Who owns the tests/vaccines/masks? The circulation of an article entitled “Coronavirus: three quarters of French people think the government lied to them about masks, according to a poll”, provides an example. It was taken up by the conspiracy site with the remark that, “What is amazing in this poll is that there is still a quarter of French people (questioned) who do not see the malice in the government's communication. Nothing can be done for them”. This text was then shared on VK by a core user, who commented “We had masks, but Israel needed them more than us! And our masters always serve Israel first”. A follower reacted: “If you say that (which is not wrong) they will still say you have visceral hatred against Israelites”.

This approach also proceeds by retrieving information without mentioning its source. For example, an article entitled “Bill Gates–Jeffrey Epstein: the connection that reveals the New World Order”, published on the conspiracy site, employs borderline information: “the noose is tightening around Bill Gates: evidence of his ‘privileged’ relationship with Mossad blackmailer pedo-criminal Jeffrey Epstein is increasingly coming to light.” When this text is moved to VK, User 2 remarks, “This is huge! His place is in jail! Will he end up committing suicide?” We can thus see that the subtly diverted snippet of information from a conspiracy news site is reformulated so as not to break the law.

A network where antisemitic discourse can circulate “legally”

In the absence of a regulating framework or online challengers, the users in our study find a space and an audience well adapted to their accusatory approach on VK. The invitation to join VK regularly appears in the comments published on the conspiracy site: “Go to VK and discover freedom of expression. YouTube is now neutered by these Israeli censors who hunt down ‘refuges’ (!) for wrong-thinkers. On VK, we piss them off.” Compared to other networks, VK users’ experience of the site moderators’ permissiveness encourages the use of accusatory language that is seen as “freedom of expression”. VK became better adapted to hosting the violent expressions of individuals seeking an unmonitored and uncensored format. Thus, VK was presented as accepting of this deviance, although it violates French law, and users leaned heavily on Nazi references as a discursive strategy despite France's ban on Nazism (Article R. 645–1 of the Penal Code). For example, in one post, User 3 shared a caricature of a train that alludes to the transport of Jews to concentration camps, and writes: “All this will soon be a detail of History”—echoing the far-right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen's attempt to downplay the importance of the Holocaust (Lepelletier, 2018).

Discussion

Figures of antisemitism in the era of COVID-19

This article is interested in how antisemitic information moves from open websites to cliquey social networks in a way that allows it to evade anti-racist legislation. We observed that localised and globalised conspiracy narratives can reinforce each other (Thomas & Zhang, 2020). Both of these strategies rely on exploiting current news. The first poses a challenge to understanding the pandemic, because the discursive strategies of antisemitism on social networks constantly recover and exploit existing discontent with health, economic and political measures. The second confirms movement of antisemites towards the radical far right (Bronner, 2020; de Zeeuw & Tuters, 2020; Knobel, 2016; Laurent, 2020; Rensmann, 2013), with all three core VK users displaying agreement with far-right parties that support closing borders and the expulsion of migrants, including Jews.

Antisemitism thus remains a form of position-taking anchored in the political game, mobilising within social networks in order to escape censorship. Indeed, the three core VK users consider themselves “outside the system” and portray their dissidence as part of their “freedom” from and independence of the traditional media or mainstream social networks. Their online interactions define a relationship to the world that has a subversive purpose and opens up a “dissident politics” (Gimenez & Voirol, 2017), allowing antisemitic opinion leaders to bypass the public stigma that weighs heavily on any form of marginalised community such as “anti-vaxxers” (Roy, 2021). In other words, online antisemitism challenges us not only because of its substantive content, but also because of its strategies of dissemination through social networks.

Information laundering: Making illegal material visible

The practices of antisemites on the Internet raise two important issues: first, the management of information and the regulation of social networks; second, the new strategies for disseminating hate speech through cliquey networks.

Despite the French legislative arsenal against hate speech, our study shows that the visibility of antisemitic speech is not restrained by the legal mechanisms brought against it, because platforms appear and reinvent themselves faster than the legislation evolves. Indeed, despite the sentencing of a man to 18 months in prison for posting antisemitic insults on VK (Urbach, 2019), a few months later, this platform became a niche space for antisemitic groups. Their discourses manage to evade censorship by “colonising” or “occupying”¹⁴ virtual spaces (Conway et al., 2019; Gimenez & Voirol, 2017). As such, we analyse how information published on VK escaped the site's moderators, so that blame and antisemitism could be deployed unhindered.

The visibility of racist, antisemitic, homophobic or misogynistic speech online has benefited from the normalisation of antisemitic prejudice (Lipstadt, 2019), leading to a legitimisation of the “brutalisation” of online debate (Badouard, 2020). Online platforms are designed to respond to the engagement and popularity of their most prolific users. However, these attributes become problematic when the effect of the cliquey network is to reinforce rumours, as opportunities to confront or refute opposing ideas are limited if communication is only possible within one's network of affiliation (Padis, 2015).

As Zheng et al. (2024) recently point out, there is no accepted scientific understanding of how online hate manages to thrive at scale. Our research indicates that new strategies for disseminating antisemitic discourse do not aim to immediately enter the public space or widely circulated social networks. Users are aware of laws that can penalise them, and some even take pride in receiving these charges to strategically gain attention. Instead, these strategies focus on building dissemination methods that erase traces of information while maintaining a strong and loyal follower base within cliquey networks. This allows for the gradual transfer of laundered information to alternative media. From these fringe platforms, where the information has been distorted, it can then be more widely shared, evading individual traces and relying on the snowball effect or clicks from platforms with a solid follower base. In summary, the approach has shifted from public forums to closed networks that organise to distort, post, and repeat hate speech and disinformation, successfully circumventing censorship and laws through these laundering procedures.

This study also allows us to report on the appropriation of information channels on social networks during a health crisis in a pandemic context. This article corroborates the idea that ideological ecosystems allow for the use of violent and provocative discourse that would not have found its place in the mass media nor on “traditional”, “public”, “accessible” websites (Albertini & Doucet, 2016; Gonimah, 2018). Indeed, most of the antisemitic VK users had already been censored in other virtual spaces and it is from the fringe networks that we can understand their reinvention in political news. Our analysis also corroborates Ong's (2020) finding that censorship has only a limited effect on such activity. Indeed, these groups will eternally look for other networks that are more “flexible” and adapted to laundering. Following Ganesh (2018), we consider it important to understand both the structure of sites and the content of discourses circulating on these platforms. Thus, our study of online antisemitism illustrates the need to go further in understanding the social and legal frameworks on fringe platforms, because they currently represent a central forum for hate discourse.

Limitations of the study

First, our analysis included only antisemitic comments. Although offering an in-depth analysis of antisemitic conversations, this procedure did not allow for the consideration of a relation between antisemitic accounts and other discriminatory discourses (anti-Asian, racist, homophobic, sexist, etc.). Second, the time covered in this paper includes a limited segment of the COVID-19 pandemic, from the first lockdown to the dates the VK accounts were censored and we were thus unable to consider the second wave of the epidemic and the emergence of vaccines.

Conclusion

Our study has provided insights into three issues. First, the re-emergence and updating of old tropes and theories about Jews as scapegoats. Second, the functioning of new communication platforms and, more specifically, of little-studied social media like VK which provided the means to construct an antisemitic discourse and build a community on it, then circulating antisemitic content on open, legal networks while avoiding legal regulations. Third, the combination of a wide range of channels that purveyors of antisemitic conspiracy theories have been able to exploit in a country with stringent laws on hate speech, including those published on social networks. A central contribution of this article is to examine how antisemitic information laundering is operationalised in practice in a cliquey network and how borderline information was transformed into explicit hate speech. This adds to the growing body of research on infodemics and provides new information in the study of that age-old phenomenon, antisemitism.

Namely, our examination of laundering allows us to analyse how antisemitic discourses can take advantage of “grey” areas produced by loopholes in national legislation regarding social networks. It has also been made clear that it is a broader issue in marginal platforms, as these are even less moderated and regulated than in the mainstream. In these marginal spaces, antisemitism is only targeted by moderators and regulators when it becomes too visible, i.e., when hateful content becomes popular and spreads to other networks. In our case, accounts of a well-known antisemitic personality were closed on YouTube and then on VK, precisely because of the violence of his content. These ad hoc responses were not based on understanding the emergence or evolution of this type of “stealth” discourse on the Internet. It is particularly necessary to consider the phenomenon of laundering because censorship is not circumvented only by choice of specific language, but also by the ongoing search for less regulated spaces. Thus, we postulate that this kind of “search” for spaces, where antisemitic framing is not yet regulated, is not limited to discourses about COVID-19 and could be repeated in relation to various political issues.

History shows that crises, including pandemics, are often moments when Jews are blamed: either they are blamed for the advent of these crises, or they are accused of hatching a plot and making us believe that we are in crisis to impose draconian measures (Girard, 2009). To the extent that we are entering a world that will continue to experience increasingly critical situations (not only relating to epidemics, but also economic crises, environmental crises, etc.), it is to be expected that this phenomenon will grow, that political polarisation will increase and that violence against Others will increase. Thus, and given the growing importance of social networks in everyday life, future research must continue to study the construction of antisemitic beliefs and the techniques used to circulate this information. In this respect, analysing online information laundering is an important avenue, given its interest in the relation between explicitly heinous comments circulating on peripheral or fringe platforms and subtle expressions that can legally exist within mainstream media.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We sincerely appreciate the valuable contributions of Andrew Wilson, whose translation, corrections, and critical editing have significantly enhanced the clarity and accuracy of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This study is part of the TRACT TRUST project – Tracking trust and suspicion: Analysis of social media to assist public health responses to Covid19 lead by Pr. Laëtitia Atlani-Duault (Ceped, Université Paris Cité - IRD) and funded by the French National Agency for Scientific Research (ANR).

ORCID iDs

Mélissa Roy

Fernando Garlin Politis

Notes

Fernando Garlin Politis is a PhD candidate at Université Paris Cité (CEPED, IRD, INSERM). His research intersects border studies, violence, and migration. Using ethnographic methods, he seeks to understand hate narratives within the governance regimes where they emerge. His publications focus on the political and aesthetic forms that alternative or marginalized groups adopt during sanitary and political crises.

Mélissa Roy, PhD, is a professor in the School of Social Work at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Working at the intersection of social work, health sociology, and critical public health, she studies sociosanitary crisis narratives, dynamics of othering, and social relations to knowledge and expertise. She is the Principal Investigator of a SSHRC Partnership Engage grant to study the effects of climate change on social work practices and analyses in the field of homelessness. Her published works focus on outbreak narratives and their related otherness figures, regimes of truth and conflicts of knowledge and expertise emerging in times of sociosanitary crises, the renewal of social work practice during social crises, and social work theories and pragmatic theoretical productions.

Jeremy K. Ward, PhD, is a tenured associate research professor (chargé de recherche) at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM). He is the Co-Principal Investigator of the ICOVAC-France project (Impact of Covid-19 on Vaccination in France, , with P. Peretti-Watel). He works at the interface of political sociology and sociology of science to shed light on issues pertaining to public attitudes and debates over medicine. His work has mainly focused on vaccine attitudes and controversies but he has also published on other issues such as the use of hydroxy-chloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19, public attitudes to what counts as a conflict of interest, to advisory bodies during the epidemic, and to clinical research.

Laëtitia Atlani-Duault is a research professor of social anthropology at the Université Paris Cité-IRD, vice-president of Université Paris Cité, and president of the Covid19 Ad Memoriam Institute, which she founded at Université Paris Cité. She is also vice-president of the Haut Conseil de la Santé Publique, and adjunct professor at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York. Her work focuses on the making of and the governance of crises, as well as their impacts on memories. She has published numerous articles in major international journals (Lancet, Ethnologie française, Transcultural Psychiatry, Social Sciences and Medicine, Public Understanding of Science, etc.) and around 20 books and special issues in French, English, and Italian.

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