The Diaspora Affairs Ministry unveiled on Thursday "the world's most advanced system" for monitoring anti-Semitic content online in real time, a ministry statement said.
Minister Naftali Bennett announced that the groundbreaking technology had been operating in a pilot format for the last month.
The new software, dubbed the Anti-Semitism Cyber Monitoring System (ACMS), was developed in collaboration with the Administration for the Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure, which operates under the Defense Ministry.
ACMS identifies and analyzes anti-Semitic posts on social media networks and maps the data, providing real-time assessments at any given moment.
The ACMS software is designed to assess how widely anti-Semitic content is spreading, identify who is sharing the posts and pinpoint geographical locations that produce the most anti-Semitic content.
Over the last month, the mechanism has flagged no fewer than 409,000 anti-Semitic posts, written by 30,000 different users. The software analyzes 200,000 potentially problematic posts per day. The three "most anti-Semitic" cities identified by the mechanism over the last month were: Santiago, Chile; Dnipro, Ukraine; and Bucharest, Romania.
The mechanism, based on cutting-edge technology, will initially focus exclusively on social media platforms Facebook and Twitter in four languages: English, Arabic, French and German. But the scope will be expanded in the future to include other platforms and additional languages.
To complement the software, a situation room has been established where analysts verify the system's data and report violent content to the relevant bodies in Israel and around the world.
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant," Bennett said at the unveiling. "From this day on, every online anti-Semite will know they are exposed. We are monitoring the hatred they spread and they will be held accountable in front of everyone."
"The time has come to place a mirror before our enemies and unmask the ugly face of the modern anti-Semite – the one who doesn't hang swastikas in the street but rather tweets them on Twitter," Bennett added. "Anti-Semitism has not disappeared. It has changed its form and moved from the street to the internet."
"Especially at this time, when we mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it is our duty to expose and shine a spotlight on individuals who incite anti-Semitism. It is an integral part of the mutual responsibility between Israel and the Diaspora," Bennett said.
