Our research group working on online antisemitism started a new project on coronavirus-related online antisemitism

2020.07.27.

Jews have been accused many times throughout the history of deliberately spreading disease among non-Jews. Simultaneously with the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic, conspiracy theories linking Jews to the virus appeared. The internet is of paramount importance in the distribution of these conspiracy theories. In our research, we examine a large text corpus of Hungarian online articles and comments/posts to answer the research question of whether coronavirus-related antisemitic discourses appear in the Hungarian online space, and if so, what their content is. Our corpus contains articles, comments, and posts written in Hungarian between December 1, 2019, and July 10, 2020, in which the different forms of the word Jew, Zionism, Israel, and that of coronavirus appear simultaneously. Fifteen students from Sociology BA at ELTE University, Faculty of Social Sciences, are participating in the research as interns.