Twenty years ago, when he wanted to investigate where antisemitism and extremism were spreading online, Oren Segal would dig for a while until he found a threat or offense. Now the digging is no longer necessary.
Hatred toward Jews online is in plain sight, said Segal, the ADL’s senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence, at an event Monday evening in Los Gatos.
“The online space is a 24/7 Klan rally,” he told Daniel Klein, CEO of Jewish Silicon Valley, who hosted Segal for a fireside chat to discuss the intersection of antisemitism, extremism and technology.
Segal told an audience of 40 people about the team of investigators and analysts he works with at the ADL. It’s their job to scope out online sources and forums with the aim of preventing an attack on the Jewish community, or any community, before it happens.
He said that antisemitic theories and tropes are so commonplace on social media that they’ve become normalized that many people can’t recognize antisemitism right in front of them.
“It’s literally two swipes away,” Segal said of ideas circulating on social media that demonize or threaten the Jewish community. Antisemitic humor, he noted, is no longer shocking or seen as offensive to many people reading it online.
“I think that access to it and the way that it is weaponized online is just something different than we have ever seen before,” Segal said, and reaches beyond TikTok, Instagram, X and Meta.
“There’s a whole set of other platforms that you may or may not have heard of, like Twitch and Steam, and a whole bunch of gaming platforms in which, actually, kids are spending most of their time,” Segal said.
AI-generated videos are another new challenge the ADL is confronting. Over the last two years of war, Segal’s team regularly found fake videos of atrocities happening in Gaza so realistic that it was nearly impossible to tell they were generated by AI.
“There are already atrocities happening; you don’t need to create fake ones,” Segal said. “Now your whole sense of what’s happening in a conflict… is completely warped, and it has this sort of antisemitic angle to it, and it seems real.”
For instance, the ADL found that videos were being made using Sora, a tool from OpenAI, which creates realistic videos based on text input by users. Segal said his team members tested the platform themselves, finding that there were no limits to what a person seeking to spread antisemitic conspiracy theories could create.
They shared their findings with Sora’s leadership and later trained employees in the company on how to identify antisemitic conspiracy theories in prompts and prevent such videos from being generated.
“Now it’s a lot less,” Segal said. “I’m not saying it’s perfect, but they started learning.”
The ADL also had success combating antisemitism spreading on Roblox, one of the most popular online gaming platforms among young children and adults alike, Segal said.
In April, the ADL published an article called “The Dark Side of Roblox,” explaining how a group of players who call themselves Active Shooter Studies (A.S.S.) had gained notoriety for creating Roblox maps (similar to a level in a video game) that replicate and glorify real-life mass shootings, reenacting national tragedies such as Columbine, Uvalde and Parkland. Other mass shootings included attacks on Jewish communities, Segal said.
The ADL alerted Roblox, Segal said, and the company made changes to remove these disturbing public game scenarios, though many still exist in private forums and on other platforms.
“It shouldn’t have taken one of my analysts … to find that. Why couldn’t they do it themselves?” Segal said. “So yeah, I’m outraged. And by the way, it’s not unreasonable for us to expect more from the companies that are taking up all of our time and making a ton of money doing it.”
The ADL is training several tech companies that are willing to work together on identifying and removing extremist and dangerous antisemitic content, Segal noted. But the vast majority of companies, he said, are unwilling to take action.
The ADL hopes some AI will be good for the Jews. The ADL is currently beta-testing an AI tool on its website for reporting antisemitic incidents that happen at school. The virtual assistant is learning how to successfully generate a sample letter to the administration of any school, including all of the data the ADL has collected about antisemitism in that school district, Segal said.
“It may not be 100% perfect,” he said, “but our goal is to use AI to harness all of our intelligence, all of our data, so that you can request something and have it.”