Hate, algorithms and Mark Carney's indifference

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL - Where does hate come from?

Lots of things. Envy, resentment, ideology, economic distress, ignorance, indifference. I’ve been writing about hate for 40 years, and I can tell you that indifference ranks pretty high up on the list, lately.

Mark Carney is a practitioner of indifference. He came to a Toronto synagogue a few days ago - ostensibly to deliver a Prime Ministerial denunciation of the variant of hate that is antisemitism - and he couldn’t once articulate the causes of the problem, or its remedies.

He offered up some platitudes and quoted philosophers, instead. He acknowledged antisemitism in Canada, yes, but he just seemed a bit…indifferent to it all, and what to do about it. The orgy of antisemitism that has beset the country he leads doesn’t really affect him or his social circle. But he’s been hearing about it from G7 leaders over canapés during his international travels, and it’s all a bit embarrassing. So he made a speech. Box, checked.

Here in Israel, where I was for the Tel Aviv International Documentary Festival - promoting a film I helped put together about antisemitism’s causes and remedies - lots of people mentioned Carney’s speech to us Canadians. They, too, were unimpressed by the Prime Minister’s failure to meet the moment.

To them, however, indifference wasn’t the biggest problem. To them, the global explosion in antisemitism we’ve all witnessed since October 7, 2023 - when apathy about antisemitism culminated in the biggest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust - has one cause above all: social media.  Over and over, I heard that from Israelis.

Antisemitism has always been with us, they said. But it is now amplified by algorithms and hashtags and AI and bot farms and the total indifference of Messrs. Musk and Zuckerberg. And Carney.

The data bears that out. The Antisemitism Research Centre of the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) issued a report about the problem while I was in Israel. CAM found that antisemitism has become so pervasive online, now, one no longer needs to search it out. Antisemitism will simply find you.

CAM studied Instagram, which is overwhelmingly favoured by young people, among whom antisemitism has gone viral, as they say.  Even with Instagram posts about a subject as benign as “wellness” - fitness, diet, clean living - antisemitism pops up like some noxious weed. Wrote the CAM people: “Across three days of 45-minute sessions [on Instagram], accounts were served content that escalated, without any active user intent, from clean eating advice and fitness motivation to conspiracy theories and explicit antisemitic content, including translated Nazi propaganda.”

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