It took just two tweets for an internet troll going by the name of Ryan Poole to get Tay to become antisemitic. Tay was a “chatbot” set up by Microsoft on 23 March, a computer-generated personality to simulate the online ramblings of a teenage girl. Poole suggested to Tay: “The Jews prolly did 9/11. I don’t really know but it seems likely.” Shortly thereafter Tay tweeted “Jews did 9/11” and called for a race war. In the 24 hours it took Microsoft to shut her down, Tay had abused President Obama, suggested Hitler was right, called feminism a disease and delivered a stream of online hate.
Coming at a time of concern about the revival of antisemitism, Tay’s outpourings illustrate the wider problem it is feeding off. Wherever the internet is not censored it is awash with anger, stereotypes and prejudice. Beneath that is a thick seam of the kind of material all genocides feed off: conspiracy theories and illogic. And, beyond that, you find something the far right didn’t quite achieve in the 1930s: a culture that sees offensive speech as a source of amusement and the ability to publish racist insults as a human right.
Microsoft claimed Tay had been “attacked” by trolls. But the trolls did more than simply suggest phrases for her to repeat: they triggered her to search the internet for source material for her replies. Some of Tay’s most coherent hate-speech had simply been copied and adapted from the vast store of antisemitic abuse that had been previously tweeted.
So much of antisemitism draws on ancient Christian prejudice that it is tempting to think we’re just dealing with a revival of the same old thing: the “socialism of fools” – as the founder of the German labour movement, August Bebel, described it. But it is mutating. And to combat this and all other racism we have to understand the extra dimension that both free speech and conspiracy theories provide. The public knows, because of Wikileaks, the scale of the conspiracies organised by western intelligence services. It knows, because of numerous successful prosecutions, that if you scratch an international bank you find fraudsters and scam artists boasting of their prowess on instant messages. It knows about organised crime because it is the subject of every police drama on TV. It knows, too, there may have been organised paedophile rings among the powerful in the past.
If you spend just five minutes on the social media feeds of UK-based antisemites it becomes absolutely clear that their purpose is to associate each of these phenomena with the others, and all of them with Israel and Jews. Once the conceit is established, all attacks by Isis can be claimed to be “false flag” operations staged by Israel. The far-right protesters in Brussels who did Nazi salutes after the bombing last week can be labelled Mossad plants, and their actions reported by “Rothschild media” outlet Bloomberg. All of this, of course, is nestled amid retweets of perfectly acceptable criticisms of modern injustice, including tweets by those who campaign against Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.
Interestingly, among the British antisemites I’ve been monitoring, there is one country whose media is always believed, whose rulers are never accused of conspiracy with the Jews, and whose armies in the Middle East are portrayed as liberators, not mass murderers. This is Putin’s Russia, the same country that has made strenuous efforts to support the European far right, and to inject the “everything’s false” meme into Western discourse. Our grandparents had at least the weapons of logic and truth to combat racist manias. But here is where those who promote genocide today have a dangerous weapon: the widespread belief among people who get their information from Twitter, Reddit and radio talk shows that “nothing we are told is true”.
Logically, to maintain one’s own ability to speak freely, it has becomes necessary in the minds of some to spew out insulting words “ironically”: to verbally harass feminists; to use the N-word. Whether the trolls actually believe the antisemitism and racism they spew out is secondary to its effect: it makes such imagery pervasive and accessible for large numbers of young people. If you stand back from the antisemitic rants, and observe their opposite – the great modern spectacle that is online Islamophobia – you see two giant pumps of unreason, beating in opposite directions but serving the same purpose: to pull apart rational discourse and democratic politics.
Calling it out online is futile, unless you want your timeline filled with imagery of paedophilia, mass murder and sick bigotry. Censorship is possible, but forget it when it comes to the iceberg of private social media chat groups the young generation have retreated to because Facebook and Twitter became too public.
Calling it out in the offline world is a start. But ultimately what defeats genocidal racism is solidarity backed by logic, education and struggle. At present the left is being asked to examine its alleged tolerance for antisemitism. So it should. But it should not for an instant give up criticising the injustices of the world – whether they be paedophile rings, fraudulent bankers, unaccountable elites or oppression perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians.
The left’s most effective weapon against antisemitism in the mid-20th century was the ability to trace the evils of the world to their true root cause: injustice, privilege and national oppression generated by an economic model designed to make the rich richer, whatever their DNA. Today, in addition, we have to be champions above all of rationality: of logic, proportionality, evidence and proof. Irony and moral relativism were not the strong points of antisemitism in the 1930s. They are the bedrock of its modern reincarnation.