ADL: Antisemitic harassment of Jewish US lawmakers nearly quintupled after Facebook changed policy

Antisemitic harassment targeting Jewish members of Congress on Facebook has increased nearly fivefold since the site changed its content moderation policies at the beginning of 2025, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) says.

At the time, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, loosened restrictions on certain types of speech and shifted away from third-party fact-checking towards a user-generated “community notes” system for addressing potentially misleading content.

Researchers at ADL’s Center for Technology and Society found that after the change, the average number of antisemitic comments per day on the Facebook accounts of 30 Jewish lawmakers jumped from 6.5 to almost 30 between February 4 and April 7, 2025.

“Meta bears responsibility for the harm that its recent moderation policy rollback has caused,” says ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, adding that the company is “enabling, if not actively encouraging, antisemitic, hateful, and toxic activity.”

The ADL, which analyzed over 337,000 comments for the report, had previously warned that Meta’s changes would lead to increased hate speech, it notes. ADL called on Meta to reconsider its decision.

In response, a Meta spokesperson says the report uses a flawed methodology and presents a false narrative.

“As always, we remove violating antisemitic content, and our enforcement here has not changed,” the spokesperson tells The Times of Israel.