The US artificial intelligence company ChatGPT logo appears on a mobile phone with OPEN AI visible in the background. Photo: Algi Febri Sugita/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect

Recent years have seen Jewish organizations’ responses to antisemitism on social media follow a familiar pattern: monitor, document, report.

They track abusive posts, measure trends and spikes, highlight the latest slurs, and publish detailed analyses — largely in an effort to alert social media platforms, rather than just Jewish communities. This work is necessary, with groups like CyberWell or the Blue Square Alliance backed by Robert Kraft, showing how online Jew-hate surges in moments of geopolitical tension. But if we are objective and honest about it, we must acknowledge it is not enough to counter the increasing hate Jews currently face.

The overlooked truth is that monitoring creates awareness, not influence. Jewish organizations may use philanthropic funding to chart antisemitic dynamics with increasing precision, but that does not disrupt those dynamics; counting Jew-hating posts does nothing to weaken their persuasive power. And by concentrating so heavily on monitoring and documentation, these organizations remain structurally reactive, responding to hate-narratives only after they’ve already spread and, in many cases, taken hold.

Echoing that strategic failure are the organizations treating antisemitism as a problem of information rather than cognitive behavior — disregarding that Jew-hate propagates through feelings, not intellect.

And while logically these organizations should understand that they need to focus on fighting that propagation, including the mechanism of that spread itself, significant financial resources are instead devoted to constantly trying to debunk lies.

But the assumption that true facts, like raising awareness, are the main requirements for changing minds is contradicted by behavioral science.

The reason is simple: antisemitism primarily isn’t rational but driven by emotion and sustained through narrative — and narrative that provides basic explanations to complex problems.

It’s why conspiracy narratives — drawing on works like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — keep resurfacing, particularly during international crises, to spread Jew-hate rapidly on social media.

If the present communal approach isn’t enough to shift the needle on antisemitism, what is? And by the same token: where should philanthropy be focused? The answer lies in moving from monitoring to influence.  

Working in our favor is that the audience we need to affect is composed, in the majority, not of ideologues but a vast movable middle — those undecided but still disposed to act according to emotion and perceived social consensus, meaning they are more likely to be susceptible to influence.

It’s similar to the political concept of the floating voter (and the ease with which this group’s thinking can be altered was nicely shown in a TV documentary experiment, Can AI Steal Your Vote?).

And taking a leaf out of the ideologue’s playbook — whether fringe conspiracists or state actors — it’s then a question of how you utilize technology to influence that moveable middle. That’s where the need for long-term strategic clarity comes in. Furthermore, the fact that the online discourse, using such technology, has been weaponized in recent times against Israel and Jews also proves it can equally be employed to fight back. Either way, Jewish organizations have not grasped the opportunity.

What they should be investing in are advances in AI — particularly low-cost systems for repetitively targeting groups on social media with our narrative.

We should use counter-messaging, as well, not to win arguments with extremists, but to shape how the wider audience, the moveable middle, interprets what they see and hear.

AI informed by frameworks like the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism, make anti-Jewish messages, posts, and images easily identifiable (something we’ve been developing at my organization, CAAI). It’s a method that supports better content moderation too. Network analysis adds another layer, where mapping of hate-narrative-spread allows a focus on key nodes of user amplification.

That none of this has been integratively done for proactive strategic change by Jewish organizations is clearly detrimental to Jews worldwide.

For such interventions to be effective they must appear in the same digital spaces where antisemitic narratives circulate, competing for the same audience’s attention, in real time. AI makes that both feasible and scalable on social media, enabling responses to be generated and deployed to counter the type, magnitude, and spread of abusive content.

With the right organizational and philanthropic shift, the Jewish presence could therefore be amplified as never before to fight back against the rising swell of antisemitism.

At present, Jewish organizations remain focused on tracking and documenting antisemitism and are not funding or implementing the kind of AI-driven approach that could reach the movable middle. Our adversaries meanwhile are engaged in something far more impactful: the systematic shaping of the movable middle’s beliefs about us.

Dr. Jonathan Myers CPsychol is an organizational psychologist, director of Psychonomics, and founder of CAAI (Combat Antisemitism with AI).