The problem
The open web is the supply chain
Social media is usually where online antisemitism is seen. It is rarely where it is made. This page sets out where it is made, why that layer survives, and why an evidence organisation should start there.
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. Work that chases them is a race against an archive that erases itself, and it produces records that are already broken by the time anyone examines them.
An article does not move. It keeps its address, its position in search results, its translations, and everything that links to it. Years later it is still there, still reachable, still being cited by people who never saw the post that pointed them to it.
That difference is not a detail of internet culture. It decides what can be documented, what can be preserved, and what a regulator, a host or a court can still be shown after the fact.
Four properties
Online antisemitism is increasingly produced through persistent open-web content infrastructure.
The four properties below are not stages of a process. They are the properties that make this layer worth attacking first.
- 01 — Produced
It is written somewhere
Narratives are drafted and packaged on websites, fringe outlets, blogs, newsletters, podcasts and pseudo-research platforms. Someone owns the domain, someone pays for the hosting, and someone decides what is published.
- 02 — Persistent
It stays where it was put
The material remains searchable, reusable and translatable long after any social post about it has gone. Persistence is what makes the same claim available to a reader who arrives years later with an ordinary question.
- 03 — Monetized
It earns
Advertising, donations, subscriptions and affiliate links turn output into income. Where money moves, a contract exists — with an advertising network, a payment service, a platform — and a contract is something that can be examined.
- 04 — Amplified
It feeds the layer everyone watches
From there it is clipped, quoted and re-hosted onto platforms, conspiracy communities and messaging channels, and from there into pressure that is felt offline [5].
The challenge is no longer only hate speech. It is content infrastructure.
The chain
Five stages, in the order they happen
Each stage has its own actors, its own economics and its own points of contact. Only the fourth is routinely watched.
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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 -
Narrative packaging
Raw claims become formats: the explainer, the “investigation”, the documentary, the reading list. The format is what makes a claim travel further than the person who made it.
Repeatable · citable · shareable -
Search and linking
Optimisation, reposting, translation and cross-linking place the material where someone who is merely curious will meet it, in the language they read.
Indexed · translated · cross-linked -
Social distribution
Clipped, quoted and re-hosted onto platforms and messaging channels. This is the layer that receives most attention, and it is the last one in the chain rather than the first.
Clipped · quoted · re-hosted -
Offline harm
Normalisation, intimidation, and sustained pressure on Jewish communities and the institutions that serve them. This is the stage that appears in no dataset of content.
The output that is not content
Illustrative construction. Not observed data. The sequence describes a structure, not a measured pathway for any particular item.
Why the open web first
Starting at the durable layer is a choice about evidence, not a claim that platforms do not matter. Four reasons carry it.
- Accessible
- The material is published in order to be found. Reading it requires no credentials, no membership and no entry into a closed space.
- Under-addressed
- Persistent sites sit outside the moderation systems of the large platforms — and the heaviest European obligations, together with most of the reporting infrastructure built around them, attach to very large platforms and search engines rather than to the sites themselves [2].
- Stronger evidence
- A page with a stable address, a publication date and an archive can be captured, hashed and re-examined. A short-lived post frequently cannot.
- Actionable pathways
- A page depends on a host, a registrar, a search index, an advertising network and often a payment service. Each of those relationships is governed by terms, and several are governed by law.
Where a page can be interrupted
The same graph that describes production also describes the points at which someone with standing can act. Naming them is not a threat; it is the reason evidence is worth collecting at all.
- The publisher and the platform. Under the Digital Services Act, hosting services in the European Union must operate a notice-and-action mechanism, and a properly formed notice can give a provider actual knowledge of specific content [2].
- Regulators. Where a European route exists, a complaint that arrives already documented is a different object from an allegation that has to be investigated from the beginning [2].
- The infrastructure behind the page. Hosting providers, domain registrars, advertising networks and payment services each impose their own terms. A single page can breach several at once.
- Legal action by others. Case files prepared to a standard a lawyer can work from, assembled for people who are qualified to decide what to do with them.
Civic Shield holds no regulatory designation. It is not a trusted flagger under Article 22 of the Digital Services Act, and it does not describe itself as one [2].
What this page does not do
The boundaries are part of the argument, so they are stated here rather than in a footnote.
It does not reproduce the content. No antisemitic text, image, symbol or paraphrase appears anywhere on this site. Reprinting is not documentation; it is distribution, and every republication is another impression and another day the page stays alive.
It does not name anyone. No individual is identified as an example, as a publisher, or as a subject. Civic Shield documents content, addresses and dates.
It does not treat criticism of a government as antisemitism. Criticism of a state, an army, a policy, a party or a leader — including Israel’s — is not antisemitism. The working definition Civic Shield uses is applied with that protection stated explicitly, and it is non-legally binding [1].
It does not claim measurements it has not made. Civic Shield has not run a pilot and holds no case files. What is described here is a design and an argument.
References
Sources
Primary sources only. Legal instruments are cited to the consolidated text on EUR-Lex. Every link on this page is re-checked when the page version changes.
- International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, Working Definition of Antisemitism (adopted 26 May 2016; non-legally binding).
- Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 — Digital Services Act. Article 16 (notice and action), Article 22 (trusted flaggers), Article 9 (orders to act against illegal content).
- European Commission, Code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online, integrated into the Digital Services Act framework.
- European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), antisemitism: annual overview of data available in the EU.
- United Nations, Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech.
- Regulation (EU) 2016/679 — General Data Protection Regulation. Article 6 (lawfulness), Article 9 (special categories), Article 35 (data protection impact assessment).
- UNESCO and the United Nations, History under Attack: Holocaust Denial and Distortion on Social Media (2022). Cited here by title. Published jointly by UNESCO and the United Nations.
Next step
This argument is meant to be examined, not admired.
If you fund, partner with or scrutinise work of this kind, the fastest way to test it is to read the governance and safeguards documentation and then take the argument apart in a conversation.