Online Antisemitism

The level of antisemitism in Hungary has always been among the highest in Europe. Representative surveys show that approximately 33 to 40 per cent of the Hungarian population is antisemitic. Although there has been some fluctuation, the level of antisemitism has remained quite stable. Moreover, we found, based on representative surveys among Hungarian Jews, that although the proportion of those having experienced or witnessed antisemitic acts one year prior to the survey decreased massively from 79 to 58 per cent between 1999 and 2017, the perception of antisemitism severely deteriorated. While in 1999, 37 per cent of Jews thought that antisemitism was strong or very strong in Hungary, in 2017 65 per cent said the same. This high discrepancy between experience and perception is due to several factors, being one of them the spread of online hatred. This fact makes the analysis of online sources necessary.

Due to the vast amount of unstructured online textual data, their examination demands new tools, one of them being Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP is an interdisciplinary field of research in the intersection of computer science, artificial intelligence, as well as linguistics. In our research, we apply NLP on a massive corpus of recent Hungarian news articles, social media content, and online forum comments. NLP makes possible not only the examination of the structure, the main topics, and actors of overt antisemitism but the identification of underlying subjects and specificities of latent antisemitism.

Related Results

Ildikó Barna, Árpád Knap (2021): An exploration of coronavirus-related online antisemitism in Hungary using quantitative topic model and qualitative discourse analysis

2022.01.11. Publication

Soon after the outbreak of the pandemic, antisemitism connected to the coronavirus appeared in the world. Ildikó Barna and Árpád Knap, members of our group analyzed the Hungarian online public sphere using quantitative topic model complemented with qualitative text analysis. They also proposed a comprehensive typology of its coronavirus-related antisemitic [...]

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Barna, Ildikó, and Árpád Knap. 2020. „A Case Study of Using LDA Topic Modeling in Sociological Research – Antisemitism in Contemporary Hungary”. Presentation, Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.

2020.01.20. Presentation

Ildikó Barna, co-leader of our research group, gave a presentation on contemporary Hungarian antisemitism at the Formal and Applied Linguistics Institute of Charles University Prague. The presentation was based on the Online Antisemitism project conducted with Árpád Knap. In addition to presenting the results of the research so far, in her lecture she [...]

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Barna, Ildikó, and Árpád Knap. 2019. „Magyarországi antiszemitizmus vizsgálata NLP topik modell segítségével”. Presentation, A társadalom kutatásának új útjai, Budapest, ELTE Faculty of Social Sciences, 11 October 2019.

2019.10.11. Presentation

On the workshop, Ildikó Barna and Árpád Knap presented the detection of various types of antisemitic narratives in articles and comments, some of which are not measurable by surveys.

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Barna, Ildikó, and Árpád Knap. 2019. „New Ways of Scrutinising Overt and Subtle Antisemitism in Hungary”. In 14th ESA Conference – Abstract book: Europe and Beyond: Boundaries, Barriers and Belonging, 880. Manchester, Egyesült Királyság: European Sociological Association

2019.08.21. Presentation

The level of antisemitism in Hungary has always been among the highest in Europe. Representative surveys show that approximately 33 to 40 per cent of the Hungarian population is antisemitic. Although there has been some fluctuation, the level of antisemitism has remained quite stable. Moreover, we found, based on representative [...]

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Barna, Ildikó, and Árpád Knap. 2019. „Antisemitism in Contemporary Hungary: Exploring Topics of Antisemitism in the Far-Right Media Using Natural Language Processing”. Theo-Web 18 (1): 75–92.

2019.06.15. Publication

In this paper, we explore antisemitism in contemporary Hungary. After briefly introducing the different types of antisemitism, we show the results of a quantitative survey carried out in 2017 on a nationally representative sample. Next, we present the research we conducted on the articles related to Jews from the far-right [...]

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Ildikó Barna’s lecture “Overt and Subtle Antisemitism in Hungary” at the “Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, Israel, and the Holocaust” workshop in Salzburg

2019.02.24. Presentation

Ildiko Barna held a presentation entitled “Overt and Subtle Antisemitism in Hungary” at the “Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, Israel, and the Holocaust” workshop in Salzburg on 23 February 2019, discussing the methods and challenges of measuring antisemitism. Besides presenting the results of surveys on antisemitism in Hungary, she talked about new research [...]

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