"How Bad Is Antisemitism Online? It’s Increasingly Hard to Know"

...TikTok, accused of elevating pro-Palestinian content, blamed “unsound analysis” of hashtag data. Some Instagram and Facebook users circulated a petition accusing the platforms’ parent company, Meta, of censoring pro-Palestinian posts, which Meta attributed to a technical bug.

Antisemitic content swarmed onto X, the platform formerly known as Twitter and run by the billionaire Elon Musk. X’s chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, said in a post on Thursday about antisemitism that “there’s no place for it anywhere in the world.”

Where the truth lies, however, is hard to glean, according to academic researchers and advocacy groups. They said the debates over content related to the Israel-Hamas war have highlighted the roadblocks complicating independent analysis of what appears on the major online services. Instead of being able to conduct methodical studies of online discourse, they must try to grasp its scope and effects using inefficient and incomplete methods.

The murkiness enables people to make dubious claims about what is dominant or popular online and allows the platforms to retort with similarly flimsy or warped evidence, limiting accountability on all sides, the researchers said.

“We’re in desperate need of rigorous, informed research on what the actual impact of platforms are on society, and we can’t do that if we don’t have access to data,” said Megan A. Brown, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan who researches the online information ecosystem...

Jamie Favazza, a spokeswoman for TikTok, said that the company supported independent research, and that it allowed over 130 academic research teams access to analyze the site. “We’re working diligently to expand eligibility to civil society researchers in the U.S. soon,” she said.

Meta declined to comment. X did not respond to a request for comment.

Background data about engagement, volume and other metrics is usually retrieved through a platform’s application programming interface, or A.P.I. The major tech companies have long offered some degree of access, but researchers said that now seems to be shrinking.

These days, researchers said, the data they can study is often dictated by what platforms want to release — “research by permission,” some explained — and is often unreliable and delayed long past the point of relevance...

TikTok has been at the center of the recent firestorm, partly because of its ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance, with some critics claiming that it is pushing pro-Palestinian content to align with the government in Beijing. TikTok has been accused of amplifying pro-Palestinian videos through its powerful algorithmic feed and of failing to address antisemitic content.

TikTok has issued multiple statements pushing back on accusations of bias, pointing to polls showing that young Americans supported the Palestinian cause before the company existed. The company has also tried to poke holes in data about popular hashtags that critics said revealed the pro-Palestinian bent on the service.

This week, TikTok said that the hashtag #standwithIsrael had fewer videos than #FreePalestine, but “68 percent more views per video in the U.S., which means more people are seeing the content.” It also pointed to public data on Instagram and Facebook, which showed millions of #FreePalestine posts and fewer than 300,000 #standwithisrael posts...