ABSTRACT

Since Jeremy Corbyn was elected as the leader of the Labour Party in September 2015, there have been major public debates relating to concerns about antisemitism in the UK Labour Party. Social media dynamics were often at the center of these discussions, but there has been little systematic, large-scale analysis of the phenomenon. This article analyzes left-wing antisemitism within public Facebook pages supportive of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom between 2015 and 2019. It finds that while none of the posts with the sample analyzed by the party pages themselves were clearly antisemitic, 56% of all comment sections contained at least one, and in the majority of cases more than one antisemitic comment, and that in 59% of the cases these comments went unchallenged. This does show that while online antisemitism within pro-Labour communities is relatively small in volume, it remains easily accessible and is not always called out.