CyberWell reports spread of antisemitic 9/11 conspiracy theories in the US
Ahead of the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, Israeli non-governmental organization CyberWell reported the spread of antisemitic conspiracy theories on social media. Their authors place responsibility for the attacks on Jews and Israel. The Jerusalem Post reports.
Posts on several social media platforms
According to CyberWell, such publications were found on Meta, Reddit, TikTok and X. Their authors baselessly claimed that Jews had allegedly planned the attacks, knew about them in advance, or secretly controlled the course of events.
Some authors used a juice box emoji as a veiled designation for Jews, which, according to the organization, may have helped bypass platform moderation. Other posts combined images related to September 11 with the antisemitic Happy Merchant caricature, and also insulted individual Jews and accused them of involvement in the terrorist attacks.
Repetition of old false claims
CyberWell also documented the renewed spread of the “dancing Israelis” conspiracy theory. It contains false claims that men from Israel who were seen near the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, knew about the attacks in advance, celebrated them, or were involved in them.
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Other posts mentioned American billionaire Larry Silverstein, claiming without evidence that he was not in the Twin Towers that morning allegedly because he had prior knowledge of the attacks.
CyberWell statement
CyberWell CEO and founder Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor said that, according to the US State Department, approximately 200 to 400 Jews, including five Israelis, were killed at the World Trade Center. According to her, this accounted for about 10% of the victims.
She noted that the spread of false theories is facilitated by algorithms focused on audience engagement, while platform policies to counter this type of hatred remain insufficient. Cohen Montemayor also said that the use of social media data to train artificial intelligence systems and large language models creates a risk of reproducing antisemitic biases as facts.
