Spain's migrant crisis was framed as global antisemitic conspiracy online -- report

Following Spain’s migrant crisis in Ceuta last week, posts accusing Israel and Jewish people of orchestrating the crisis spread quickly on social media, reaching an estimated 103 million people on X within 72 hours, according to an analysis by the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Antisemitism Research Center (ARC).

The report examines 173 high-impact posts from 119 influencer accounts published after more than 50,000 migrants crossed into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta on July 30.

Together they generated 57.5 million views, an estimated reach of 103.1 million, 1.9 million likes, and 368,400 shares in two days, ARC calculates.

Posters falsely claimed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directed migrants into Spain due to its policies regarding Israel. In one, viewed 5.3 million times, an AI-generated image shows Netanyahu with a line of migrants filing from his open mouth onto a Spanish beach, ARC says.

Another account claimed Israel had “admitted” engineering the migration through Mossad.

“This is not a story about a few bad actors,” says CAM CEO Sacha Roytman Dratwa. “It is a story about a platform whose design rewards the fastest and most inflammatory explanation available, and on X that explanation is increasingly a Jewish conspiracy.”