Antisemitic comments on Facebook pages of leading British, French, and German media outlets

Abstract

We conducted a cross-national study on antisemitic hate speech on the Facebook profiles of leading media outlets in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. In a combination of qualitative pragmalinguistic analysis and quantitative analysis, we examined their comment sections concerning the conceptual and linguistic repertoire of verbal antisemitism in these three languages as well as to the frequency of antisemitic utterances. The corpus comprises 4500 comments (1500 for each language) made in reaction to the media’s Facebook posts reporting on an escalation phase of the Arab–Israeli conflict in May 2021. Since in antisemitism studies, Israel—and issues related to it—are widely perceived as today’s main pretext for communicating antisemitic resentment, unsurprisingly, those events led to the emergence of antisemitic content online. This article contrasts the findings of antisemitism in the three countries’ comment sections and illustrates them by presenting a variety of linguistic realisations of various antisemitic concepts and illustrates the corresponding steps of interpretation.