Civic Shield · Evidence-first civic technology
A screenshot is not evidence. Not yet.
Civic Shield is building evidence infrastructure against the open-web supply chain of antisemitism. Public sources. Preservation to an evidentiary standard. Human review before anything leaves the building.
In formation · No legal entity yet · See scene: what we have not done
You will not see the content on this site.
We can describe it precisely, and we will. But reprinting it is not documentation — it is distribution. Every republication is another impression, another search result, another day the page stays alive.
So everything that follows is the structure around the content: where it is made, where it lives, who carries it, what it pays for, and what it becomes.
The evidence goes in the vault. Not on the homepage.
A post has a half-life.
A page does not.
Posts are deleted, hidden, buried by the next thing, or lost when an account goes. Chasing them is a race against an archive that erases itself.
An article does not move. It keeps its address, its search ranking, its translations and everything that links to it. Years later it is still there, still first, still being cited by people who have never heard of the post.
posts, over time
Nothing about you is recorded here. This rail logs the story, not the reader.
Online antisemitism is increasingly produced through persistent open-web content infrastructure.
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01
Produced
Narratives are written and packaged on websites, fringe media, blogs, newsletters, podcasts and pseudo-research platforms.
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02
Persistent
They stay searchable, reusable and translatable long after any social post about them has disappeared.
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03
Monetized
Advertising, donations, subscriptions and affiliate links turn the output into an income.
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04
Amplified
From there it feeds social platforms, conspiracy communities and real-world intimidation.
The work is being done by hand.
People search, screenshot, translate, report and follow up — one item at a time. It is careful work, done by serious people, and much of it is very good.
It does not scale to the thing it is fighting. Four constraints defeat it, and none of them can be solved by working harder.
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Volume
More is produced each day than any group of people can read, let alone document.
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Fragmentation
Findings live in inboxes, spreadsheets, group chats and individual memory. Nothing accumulates. The same site is discovered for the first time, repeatedly.
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Language and coded speech
It crosses languages and hides in substitutions, in-jokes and numerals. By the time a code is understood, it has already been replaced.
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Institutional friction
A report that arrives without a preserved record, a policy reference and a clear provenance chain is easy to close and hard to escalate.
Nothing here is a failure of will. It is a failure of infrastructure.
The open-web supply chain
Social media is often the distribution layer.
The open web is the supply
chain.
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Source sites
Websites, blogs, fringe outlets, newsletters, podcasts and video pages where the material is written in the first place.
Owned · Hosted · Addressed
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Narrative packaging
Raw claims become formats: the explainer, the "investigation", the documentary, the reading list. The format is what makes it travel.
Repeatable · Citable · Shareable
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Search and linking
Optimisation, reposting, translation and cross-linking put the material where someone who is merely curious will find it.
Indexed · Translated · Cross-linked
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Social distribution
Clipped, quoted and re-hosted onto platforms and messaging channels — the layer everybody watches, and the last one in the chain.
Clipped · Quoted · Re-hosted
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Offline harm
Normalisation, intimidation, and sustained pressure on Jewish communities and the institutions that serve them.
- Source sites
- Narrative packaging
- Search and linking
- Social distribution
- Offline harm
Civic Shield starts at the durable layer: the sites and content networks that produce and legitimise the narrative.
The last stage of a content supply chain is not content.
- A community that changes what it puts on the outside of its own building.
- A person who stops saying where they are going.
- An institution that budgets for a door.
This is the part that does not appear in any dataset.
Hate that is hidden is a problem of individuals.
Hate that is justified is
a problem of structures.
The same sentence. Six places.
- anon >> thread >> 02:47 reply · quote · report
- The Chronicle
- Subscribe Donate
- 3 h Reply · Share · Report
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It never had to get louder.
It only had to stop needing a place to hide.
- 01 An anonymous forum, pseudonymous, 2 a.m.
- 02 A blog with a masthead and an "about" page
- 03 A podcast description, with a donate link
- 04 The third result for an ordinary question
- 05 A comment beneath a legitimate news article
- 06 —
By the time harm looks reasonable, prevention has already become a different and much harder job.
No content is reproduced on this page. The bar above is a redaction, not a quotation.
Counting tells you where a society is.
It does not tell you where it is
going.
Two societies can report the same number of incidents in the same year and be moving in opposite directions. One is coming down from a shock. The other is on the way up and has not arrived yet. The count is identical. The situation is not.
Direction is not visible in a total. It is visible in structure: what kind of content is being produced, where it is hosted, who is repeating it, what it is beginning to be allowed to sit next to.
That is a question about evidence, not about arithmetic — and evidence is what almost nobody is collecting in a form that survives.
We are not building a better count.
Then document it
so well that
someone has to act.
Civic Shield turns scattered outrage into structured evidence, accountable networks, and enforceable action.
- Scan
- Classify
- Preserve
- Map
- Escalate
Scan, and classify
Scan
Public sources. Read only.
Websites, blogs, public forums, newsletters, podcasts and video pages — material that is published to be found, collected lawfully and at scale, in the languages it is actually written in.
No private groups. No closed communities. No messages. Nothing that requires being let in. Later phases extend to social platforms and permissioned reporting from people who choose to take part.
- Site
- Blog
- Forum
- Newsletter
- Podcast
- Video page
- Archive
- Mirror
- Private group
- Direct message
Classify
Categories, not verdicts about people.
Each item is assessed against a defined taxonomy — Holocaust denial and distortion, October 7 denial, conspiracy narratives, scapegoating, coded language, glorification of violence, monetized antisemitic content — and returned with a category, a severity, a confidence, and the specific passages that support the reading.
The output is never "this person is antisemitic." It is "this content, at this address, on this date, appears to meet this definition and to violate this rule, for these stated reasons."
Record A
Record B
- Category
- CONSPIRACY NARRATIVE NONE — POLITICAL CRITICISM
- Severity
- 3 / 5 —
- Confidence
- 0.87 0.94
- Supporting passages
- 4 · REDACTED —
- Legitimate-criticism check
- NOT APPLICABLE PASSED — NOT FLAGGED
Preserve
This is what we mean by evidence.
Not a screenshot in a chat. A structured record built to survive being examined by someone who would prefer it fell apart.
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01 · CAPTURE
The address, exactly
The full URL, the time of capture in UTC, the response the server gave, and the page as it was served at that moment — not as it looks today.
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02 · IMAGE
What a person would have seen
A full-page rendering, preserved as an image, so the record survives even if the page is later rewritten or removed.
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03 · SOURCE
What the page actually contained
The underlying page markup, stored alongside the image, so text, links and embedded references remain examinable rather than merely visible.
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04 · READABLE TEXT
Including the text inside pictures
Optical character recognition for images; transcription for audio and video. Hate that is placed inside a picture to escape a text filter does not escape this.
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05 · TRANSLATION
With the original always kept
A translation is attached, never substituted, and carries its own confidence value. The original language is the record. The translation is an aid to reading it.
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06 · SEAL
A number that cannot survive an edit
A SHA-256 hash computed over the preserved bundle. It does not protect the content. It proves the content has not changed since the moment it was sealed.
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07 · POLICY MATCH
The specific rule, in the version that applied that day
The exact platform policy clause or legal provision the content appears to breach — recorded together with which version of that policy was in force on the date of capture. Rules change. Records should not have to.
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08 · CHAIN OF CUSTODY
Who touched it, when, and what changed
An append-only log of every action taken on the record — capture, review, decision, escalation — with the human and the system version responsible for each. Nothing can be quietly amended. Nothing can be silently deleted.
Built to an evidentiary standard, and built to survive examination. We make no stronger claim than that about a preserved record until a lawyer has cleared one.
Illustrative record · content redacted · not a real case · no case files exist yet
The difference between “I saw something terrible”
and “here is a file someone can act on.”
Preserve
Change one character. Watch the seal break.
A hash is a fingerprint of a file. Alter anything at all inside the record — one letter, one pixel, one line of markup — and the fingerprint changes completely and visibly.
It is the reason a preserved record can be handed to a regulator, a platform, a lawyer or a journalist, and still mean something after it has passed through several hands.
Illustrative record fragment · not a real case
4
SHA-256 of the fragment
a86fe4bc75e50c22eb8ed043b9a9b084df8dfc305e6159a89a8c459a4d7f08e7
Seal intact · SHA-256 matches capture
Computed by your browser with the platform's own SubtleCrypto. No server, no library, no image. Return the control to its starting position and the original hash returns exactly — that determinism is the whole property.
Evidence is not what you saw. It is what you can still prove you saw.
Map
One page is an incident.
Two hundred pages sharing an author, a host and a payment link are a structure.
Preserved records are only the beginning. Held together, they show what a single report can never show: which sites recycle each other, which text reappears in four languages, which domains keep resurfacing under new names, and which of them are being paid.
That is the difference between reporting a page and being able to describe the thing the page belongs to.
Who repeats it·Who hosts it·What pays for it
Mapping infrastructure is not the same as identifying people, and we do not do the second. What we map are sites, domains, hosts, republication paths and monetisation signals — not private individuals.
Escalate
Evidence is only worth what it lets someone do.
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Notice to the platform or the publisher
A properly formed notice citing the specific rule, the preserved record, and the version of the policy in force on the day.
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Regulatory escalation
Where a European route exists, a complaint that arrives already documented rather than as an allegation to be investigated from scratch.
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The infrastructure behind the page
Hosting providers, domain registrars, advertising networks and payment services each have their own terms. A page can violate all of them at once.
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Support for legal action
Case files prepared to a standard that a lawyer can work from — assembled for people who are qualified to decide what to do with them.
Where this stops
Every escalation is reviewed by a person before it leaves. We prepare drafts for humans. We do not file lawsuits automatically. We do not publish names, and we do not maintain public blacklists. Nothing here is designed to work without someone accountable pressing send.
The limits
The limits are the product.
An evidence system that cannot say what it refuses to do is just a surveillance system with better manners. So, plainly:
- We do not name people. Our output describes content, addresses and dates. It does not label individuals.
- We do not read private messages, and we do not enter closed spaces. Public sources only. If getting in requires being let in, we are not there.
- We do not run reporting swarms. Volume is not our tactic. A well-built single notice is.
- We do not file anything automatically that a person has not approved. Human review sits before every escalation, without exception.
- We do not publish blacklists. No public register of names, no shaming index, no scoreboard.
- We do not treat criticism of a government as antisemitism. Including criticism of Israel's. This is a defined, reviewed classification outcome, not an afterthought.
- We do not profile individuals, and we never will. Our research is about content, networks and institutions. Never about predicting what a person will do.
- Our research collection only reads. Where collection is automated, it reads public material and does nothing else: it never posts, never replies, never engages, never brigades, never mass-reports, and never enters private spaces or closed groups.
If we ever break one of these, it should be possible to prove it.
That is what the record is for.
Who is behind it
At this stage, the founding team is the core asset.
There is no institution to point at yet. What exists is a set of competencies assembled deliberately, and the judgement to know which parts of this must never be automated.
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Strategy and institution building
Designing the organisation, its governance and its partnerships from zero.
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AI and ML systems
Production systems over large document collections: retrieval, agents, structured extraction, evaluation.
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Trust and safety
Moderation logic, policy interpretation and coded language, from inside the field.
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Finance, governance and operations
Accounting, controls, reporting and the unglamorous machinery that makes a public-benefit body auditable.
Civic Shield is European democratic-resilience infrastructure: an evidence layer that democratic societies can use to protect institutional accountability and public trust, and to document, understand and lawfully act on antisemitic and group-based online hate. It is founded by a Jewish team, and it is built to be governed as a public-benefit institution rather than as an advocacy project.
- Boaz Benrush Founder and Executive Director
- Awaiting consent to publish
- Uriel (Ari) Naor Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer
- Awaiting consent to publish
Roles and credentials are on about. This site publishes no personal contact details for any member of the team — no personal email, no telephone number, no photograph — and no citizenship or country of residence. Full biographies are in the due diligence package.
What we have not done.
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0
Legal entities registered
Civic Shield is in formation. It is intended to be established as a European public-benefit body. It is not one yet.
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0
Pilots run
No monitoring pilot has taken place. The six-month programme below has not started.
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0
Partners confirmed
No organisation has agreed to work with us. Every institution named in our materials is one we intend to approach, not one that has said yes.
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0
Case files produced
The evidence package you scrolled through is an illustration of a design. No real record exists yet.
We are telling you this on the homepage, in the same type as everything else, because an organisation whose product is evidence should not open with a claim it cannot evidence.
Everything above this point is a description of what we are building and how we intend to work. Everything we have actually completed is on the roadmap, dated.
The programme
Six months, and what exists at the end of them.
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Months 1–2
Foundations
Taxonomy and definitions. The source universe. Ingestion. The evidence schema that every later record depends on.
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Months 3–4
Core build
Narrative classification workflows. The Evidence Vault. Human review and the case workflow that sits in front of every escalation.
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Months 5–6
MVP operations
Monitoring in selected European contexts. A target of 75–150 structured case files. An impact dashboard. A plan for what scales next.
- Open-web monitoring prototype
- Evidence Vault
- Action engine
- Founding impact report
These are targets, published as targets. The Founding Impact Report will state what was achieved against them, including what was not.
The founding year, continued
Reporting content asks a platform to act.
Publishing what it did is a different job.
So the founding year also builds the Platform Accountability Index: a public, versioned record of what actually happened to the notices Civic Shield sent — by platform, by country, by language, by category. It will be published as dated editions, with the method released before the first figure is.
Status · commitment · nothing measured, nothing published, no edition exists
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Time to first response
From the notice leaving us to the first substantive answer. Our clock, our outbound record.
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Action rate
Removed, restricted, labelled or geo-blocked — counted against everything sent, not everything answered.
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Appeal outcomes
Upheld, reversed, or never resolved. Reported in both directions, including the appeals we lose.
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Re-upload rate
Whether removed content came back. A removal that does not hold is not a removal.
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Consistency by language and country
The same category of content, notified in different languages, and whether the outcome differs.
Civic Shield will be able to publish that record whatever it says, because it has no platform partnership, no commercial relationship with any service it would measure and no regulatory designation — nothing that an unwelcome result could cost it. That is a description of how this organisation is built, not a claim about anyone else’s.
None of it exists today. The method is published first so that it cannot be adjusted later to suit the answer.
We are not asking you to donate.
We are asking you to found something.
Civic Shield needs founding support for a six-month programme: to build the monitoring prototype, the Evidence Vault and the review workflow, and to produce the first structured case files and the Founding Impact Report that will say honestly how it went.
Request the due-diligence pack and a 30-minute briefing You give us an email address. We send the pack and a time to talk. Nothing else happens.
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Founding funder
For foundations and institutional funders. You receive the full funder deck, the due diligence package, the governance and safeguards documentation, and a direct conversation with the founding team.
Request the due diligence package -
Founding supporter
For private donors who want to be part of establishing this rather than sponsoring it. Same materials, same conversation, and named involvement in the founding cohort if you want it — or none at all if you do not.
Arrange a conversation -
Founding partner
For community organisations, monitors, researchers and lawyers. What we would want from you is scrutiny before money: tell us where the method is wrong.
Offer expertise or challenge the method
Why there is no donate button
There is no registered entity yet, and therefore no account that can properly receive, account for or report on a donation. Taking money before that exists would be exactly the kind of shortcut this organisation is being built to refuse.
When the entity is registered, this page will say so on the day it happens, and the button will appear here.
Fund the founding.
Record · Civic Shield homepage
21 scenes · sealed
Nothing about this session was stored
Evidence-first civic technology.