Inside FOA: Fighting Antisemitism That Works
Meeting Tomer Aldubi, Founder and Executive Director of Fighting Online Antisemitism at the Jewish Federation of North America General Assembly revealed a pre-October 7th success story we desperately need to know about
“Some organizations are good, some are great,” I told Tomer as we settled into our conversation at the Jewish Federation of North America General Assembly. “And there’s like this post-October 7th organization, and there’s pre-October 7th, and you fall into the pre.”
The distinction matters more than you might think.
When I sat down with this Tel Aviv native, I expected another conversation about the seemingly insurmountable challenges facing our community online. What I discovered instead was something genuinely transformative—an organization that cracked the code on actually removing antisemitic content from social media platforms.
“Social media is complicated for so many different reasons,” I continued, “and what you’ve developed is actually transformative.”
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Fighting Online Antisemitism (FOA) isn’t just making noise—they’re making a measurable impact. In 2024, they achieved a 40% content removal rate across major platforms. To put that in perspective, TikTok alone saw removal rates exceeding 50% for content FOA flagged. These aren’t just statistics; they represent tens of thousands of hateful posts, threats, and harassment campaigns stopped in their tracks.
“Some organizations are good, some are great,” I told Tomer during our interview. “And what you’ve built is actually transformative.”
The Pre-October 7th Advantage
Here’s what sets FOA apart: they started in 2020, years before the current crisis. While many organizations scrambled to respond after October 7th, FOA already had established relationships with social media platforms. They had people to call. Channels already open. Trust already built.
“The organization was founded in 2020, and I think this gives us lots of advantage and experience,” Tomer explained, leaning forward. “Since antisemitism since October 7th has been changed mostly into anti-Zionist content. But we have good connections with the social media platforms even before that.”
He paused, letting that sink in. “So when October started, there was someone for us to talk within the social media platforms. We didn’t need to start from scratch.”
That head start proved invaluable when the deluge began.
The Trusted Flagger Difference
The secret to FOA’s success lies in understanding something most people miss: not all content reports are created equal. When you or I flag something on social media, we’re just another voice in the crowd. But when FOA reports content, platforms pay attention.
Why? Because FOA operates as a “Trusted Flagger”—a designation that gives them direct access to platform enforcement teams. The difference is stark: FOA’s Trusted Flagger reports achieved a 40% removal rate in 2024, compared to just 22% for volunteer reports on the same content.
Tomer broke it down for me: “As you said, social media is complicated, but our removal rate, which is 40% in 2024, is the highest removal rate, an average of five leading social media platforms, TikTok and Meta and some others.”
He leaned in, emphasizing the point: “So I would say it’s very complicated to remove content, but once you know how to do it, the social media platforms, they will follow the policy and they will remove the content if we tell them or ask them or send them some content to review and remove.”
The key is understanding the rules of the game. “The way we work is that we train volunteers. So it’s a combination of people, volunteers—you can be a volunteer, everyone can be a volunteer. We have hundreds of volunteers worldwide, and we teach them how they can report content.”
But here’s the crucial distinction: “It’s not just about reporting content, it’s about reporting the accurate content. The content of the platform would say, okay, that’s bad, you’re right, I need to remove this because this violates my guidelines.”
He used a perfect analogy: “Many people report content, but they don’t really know which content violates the guidance of the platforms. It’s like when you go to the police, you would complain about something, but this is not against the law and legislation in your country, so why should you go to the police? So we teach them about the policy.”
The workflow is elegant: “Once they report content, sometimes it is removed already. If it’s not, they talk with us. And based on our reports, whenever we talk with social media platforms, because it’s called trusted flaggers, then we are able to remove more content.”
Then came the revelation that explains everything: “Each platform removes more content whenever we, as a non-profit organization, talk with them directly compared to any private volunteer, including myself. If I was reporting content from my own profile, regardless of the fact that I’m the CEO, they would say, okay, you’re just a volunteer, you’re just a private person. We most likely not going to remove the content compared to working with a non-profit organization.”
Training Digital Warriors
But FOA isn’t hoarding this power—they’re democratizing it. The organization has trained hundreds of volunteers across five continents, teaching them not just to report content, but to report it effectively.
I was giving a talk in New York City just yesterday, featuring FOA’s work to an older crowd. “These people were like, ‘how do I become a volunteer?'” I told Tomer. “You’re creating this community of people that want to be these digital activists that are hungry for the process. You’re simplifying the process for volunteers—they see something that is problematic to be able to actually do something.”
Tomer’s response captured the elegance of their model: “Our vision is that we can remove content and we want people to know how they can do it themselves. We don’t think necessarily the social media platforms are our enemy, because if TikTok is going to be the best platform for Israelis and Jews, and it might be now in the States, they will move—the people that hate us and the racist people, they will move to other platforms.”
His point was profound: This isn’t about winning on one platform. It’s about building a community that knows how to fight back anywhere.
“So it’s not about social media,” he continued. “It’s about us knowing how we can fight back.”
The training makes all the difference. FOA teaches volunteers to understand platform policies inside and out, to know what crosses the line from offensive to actionable. They’ve created a streamlined system where volunteers can report content directly through FOA’s AI-enhanced dashboard, ensuring consistency and accuracy.
“Once we have new volunteers, we teach them how they can report content, and we created a system,” Tomer explained. “Our system is using also AI tools, and also it allows you very easily to go into our system with your own username and account that is just for you, and you can report content that goes directly to us.”
Why the centralization? “Because the main idea is that we want the content to be reported in the same way. So if we have hundreds of volunteers, we want them to send us the content as we know that it’s most likely to be removed.”
The system even offers flexibility for different volunteer styles: “Some people are very happy to report content and find it themselves, some people prefer to go into our system and monitor the content which is already there. So if we had more volunteers, I would say the accurate content of the AI would be also better.”
The organization conducted training programs across the globe in 2024—from Canada to Chile, Brazil to Germany. Over 3,000 participants engaged in workshops delivered in five languages. They’re building a global army of informed digital activists who know how to fight back.
“I would say another thing that’s very important to think about is community notes, especially in the United States,” Tomer emphasized when we discussed the future of online moderation. “In Europe, they have their own legislation, the DSA. It’s quite advanced, even more than Israel. We don’t have any good legislation in our country.”
He paused, then drove home his point about America: “But I would say in the United States, we really need to take care about community notes. We need to teach people how they can use that. And we haven’t even started talking about Wikipedia, which has become a very anti-Semitic website where everybody can say whatever they want about us.”
The vision extends beyond just one battleground: “But the community notes on Facebook and on X and on TikTok, it’s going to be evolved in the United States where people are going to decide if this content should be taken down or not. So we need more people on our side, not just from the Jewish community, but more people that want to be trained, that come to us, get the training, all free of charge.”
The Evolution of Hate
What FOA discovered in 2024 reveals the shifting nature of online antisemitism. The data tells a troubling story:
Classic antisemitism still leads at 38.5% of reported content, but the categories that saw the most dramatic increases were support for terrorism (11.6%) and incitement to violence (13.4%)—both surging after October 7th. Posts glorifying Hamas, celebrating the October 7th massacre, and threatening violence against Jewish communities worldwide flooded social platforms.
This shift wasn’t lost on Tomer: “I think this gives us lots of advantage and experience since antisemitism since October 7th, has been changed mostly into anti-Zionist content.”
Anti-Zionist content, now representing 15.4% of reports, has become the new disguise for age-old hatred. And here’s where FOA scored a major victory: they successfully lobbied Meta to expand its community guidelines to recognize certain contexts of anti-Zionism as antisemitism.
“We had a huge achievement with Meta, when last year they decided to include anti-Zionist content as part of the platform,” Tomer told me with visible pride. “It’s part of the policy today, so they should remove the content. Again, the question is, are they going to remove it, and who’s going to enforce it? So we want to do the same with other platforms.”
His ambition is clear: “They would include this as part of the policy on TikTok, on X, on another platform, even like Telegram.”
Perhaps most insidious is how hate adapts. FOA documented deliberate misspellings designed to evade automated moderation—”J*ws,” “j€ws,” alternative spellings in multiple languages. The hatred is the same; only the packaging changes.
Real Lives, Real Impact
The statistics matter, but the individual stories reveal FOA’s true impact. During our conversation, Tomer shared a case that stopped me cold.
“We are trying to expand our connections in the United Kingdom, in London,” he began. “And we got this call online from a Jewish family, Israeli Jewish family in London. Their daughter went to a non-Jewish high school. You know, it’s fine.”
But it wasn’t fine.
The 16-year-old girl, with over 308,000 TikTok followers, became a target. “She got lots of hate against her on TikTok, mostly by Muslim friends or Muslim colleagues that created fake profiles about her. So they took her name and picture, and they published the address and lots of fake information.”
The family did what they were supposed to do—they went to the police. “But the police in the UK, in London, it took them lots of time. It wasn’t really helpful.”
Then they contacted FOA. “When they talked with us, we talked directly with TikTok. And it took like 24 hours or something to remove the entire, all of their accounts.”
Within a day, approximately 200 pieces of violating content disappeared—threatening videos, fake profiles, doxing attempts, harassment campaigns that had been tormenting a teenage girl both online and offline.
“That’s why I really, I’m very thankful for this interview,” Tomer said, his voice carrying genuine urgency. “Because more people need to know that if you have anything bad online—you, your children, your parents, anyone—you need to have this kind of organization, us or any other organization that talks with the social media platforms.”
He explained the harsh reality most people don’t understand: “It’s not easy to just find someone who is, you know, the relevant one. It’s not like anyone can go to TikTok and send an email.”
But FOA can. And does.
They’ve also stepped in for influencers whose pro-Israel content got them mass-reported and suspended. “Many influencers, for example, recently we had a big influencer conference in Israel with Nefesh Bnefesh. Because influencers, when the war started, they were blocked on social media platforms because pro-Palestinian people just reported them.”
Even influencers doing amazing work found their accounts blocked for weeks. “So they talked with us. And after we kind of gathered a few dozens, we said, let’s meet all together and give you some solutions.”
The Ulster-Scots/Americans Facebook page—run by people in Northern Ireland sharing pro-Israel content and advocating for Gaza hostages—was one such case. Mistakenly suspended, it was quickly restored through FOA’s intervention.
“Relationships matter,” I observed.
“Exactly,” Tomer replied. “We want people to know that if you have something bad online, talk with us, send us an email. We do it because we can and we want to help.”
The Platforms: A Mixed Report Card
FOA’s work reveals dramatic differences in how platforms handle antisemitism:
TikTok leads with the highest removal rate—over 50% in 2024, sometimes reaching 70% in individual months. Their Community Partners program gave FOA access to the TikTok Safety Enforcement Tool (TSET), enabling direct escalation.
Meta (Facebook and Instagram) shows moderate but improving removal rates, especially after policy updates recognizing anti-Zionist content as antisemitism in certain contexts.
X (formerly Twitter) presents mixed results, with particular challenges around doxing and targeted harassment that technically doesn’t violate their privacy policy if it involves publicly available information.
YouTube removed significant pro-Hamas content from channels like that of Moataz Matar, an Egyptian journalist with 4.75 million subscribers who openly glorified the October 7th attacks.
Telegram, Gab, and VKontakte lag far behind, with significantly lower removal rates—highlighting platforms where hate finds easier harbor.
What You Can Do
During our interview, I mentioned a concern that’s been weighing on me: “I just gave my son a phone. And how do you train parents in sort of even explaining to kids what they might experience?”
Tomer laughed. “Well, I do not have children. One day I will have, and I think they were going to use phones.”
But his organization has thought deeply about this challenge. “First of all, I really invite anyone to go to our website, foantisemitism.org, because we have a series of educational guides. It’s, again, free of charge. One of them is about parents and children. So we already created something for parents and children. It’s on the website.”
Then he offered something that resonated with me as a parent: “I would say it’s very important to ask your child, the children, which platform they’re using. And many of them use, I would say, gaming platforms. So we got Reddit, Discord, but also gaming platforms.”
This caught my attention. Gaming platforms?
“Today they play online with users they do not know,” Tomer continued. “And they say they are from Israel, or they say they are Jews with a Jewish name. They will get lots of antisemitism within the gaming platforms.”
His advice was practical and immediate: “So I would say, ask your child which platform they use. Is it TikTok? Is it Instagram? Is it another one? And teach them about basic advice about the policy. Or maybe you can do something together.”
FOA is even experimenting with joint parent-child workshops. “Some of our workshops, we are thinking to do parents and children, because the parents usually join our workshops, and the students also. So we’re thinking to combine between the students and their parents, or the parents and their children, to have one workshop for them together.”
Why the joint approach? “It might be easier for them to talk about these topics when we are there, not just one-on-one.”
You don’t have to be a tech expert or social media guru to make a difference. As Tomer made clear: “I really invite anyone to go to our website… you can be a volunteer, everyone can be a volunteer.”
FOA offers:
- Free training workshops in multiple languages (“All free of charge. We won’t ask money from people who want to be a volunteer”)
- Educational guides for parents and children (available at foantisemitism.org)
- Volunteer opportunities for anyone who wants to make a difference
- Direct support if you or someone you know faces online harassment
“We also have online workshops,” Tomer added. “Now the last cycle of this project is going to end, but we’ll start in next year, another cycle. So it’s online workshops of different topics and you can register and join whenever you have time. Usually it’s also good for American people, you know, for Western, Eastern coast and usually from Europe. So people can join and learn. And I would say just free and you should do it, you know.”
When I asked where people can get involved, he was direct: “I would say you can look on Instagram, find online antisemitism on Instagram, on LinkedIn, or you can go to the website, which is foantisemitism.org and you will find a way to volunteer.”
Breaking: A Major Victory This Week
Just this past week, FOA notched another significant win. Following sustained reporting and strategic pressure from the organization, extremist influencer Nick Fuentes was suspended from X.
Known for Holocaust denial, explicit antisemitism, and incitement against Jews, Fuentes had long operated with relative impunity on the platform. But FOA’s team carefully documented dozens of policy violations, built an airtight case, and persistently urged X to uphold its own community standards.
“It’s proof that when we act professionally and consistently, platforms listen,” FOA announced.
The suspension demonstrates something crucial: this work isn’t theoretical. With the right approach, documentation, and persistence, even high-profile extremists can be held accountable. It’s exactly the kind of strategic victory that validates FOA’s model—professional, evidence-based advocacy that forces platforms to enforce their own rules.
The Road Ahead
Building on victories like the Fuentes suspension, FOA’s 2025-2026 action plan is ambitious: expand AI capabilities, recruit thousands of new volunteers, push for policy changes across all major platforms, and adapt to the shifting landscape of social media moderation.
They’re particularly focused on community notes—the crowd-sourced fact-checking features on platforms like X. “In Europe, they have their own legislation, the DSA. It’s quite advanced, even more than Israel. We don’t have any good legislation in our country,” Tomer explained. “But I would say in the United States, we really need to take care about community notes. We need to teach people how they can use that.”
He sees this as critical infrastructure: “The community notes on Facebook and on X and on TikTok, it’s going to be evolved in the United States where people are going to decide if this content should be taken down or not. So we need more people on our side, not just from the Jewish community, but more people that want to be trained, that come to us, get the training, all free of charge.”
But it’s not just about expanding numbers—it’s about expanding reach. “In the last few years, we’ve been working with Palm Beach Federation, the Metro West in New Jersey, communities in Canada, in Australia, in Brazil. Many people reached out to us because they were looking for this kind of information.”
And Tomer hasn’t forgotten about other battlegrounds: “We haven’t even started talking about Wikipedia, which has become a very anti-Semitic website where everybody can say whatever they want about us.”
The organization is also expanding its legal advocacy, leveraging its European presence and membership in the International Network Against Cyber Hate (INACH) to escalate cases under the EU’s Digital Services Act.
Why This Matters
In 2024, Jewish students were assaulted on campuses for wearing kippot. Synagogues were firebombed. Israeli soccer fans were hunted in Amsterdam. A kosher restaurant in Boston was defaced with swastikas and calls for extermination.
Every one of these real-world attacks was preceded, accompanied, and amplified by online hate. The digital sphere isn’t separate from physical reality—it’s the accelerant that turns isolated incidents into coordinated campaigns of terror.
“The riots in Amsterdam are an example of how allowing online incitement can quickly escalate into physical harm,” FOA’s annual report notes.
But Tomer sees the platforms themselves as potential partners, not enemies. “We don’t think necessarily the social media platforms are our enemy,” he told me, “because if TikTok is going to be the best platform for Israelis and Jews, and it might be now in the States, they will move—the people that hate us and the racist people, they will move to other platforms.”
His point was strategic and profound: “So it’s not about social media, it’s about us knowing how we can fight back.”
Fighting online antisemitism isn’t about censorship or silencing legitimate criticism. It’s about enforcing the community standards that platforms themselves have established. It’s about protecting children from targeted harassment. It’s about preventing incitement to violence. It’s about making the internet reflect the values of human dignity that we claim to hold.
The Bottom Line
What Tomer Aldubi and FOA have built is rare: an organization that doesn’t just talk about the problem—they solve it. With cutting-edge AI, trained volunteers, strategic platform partnerships, and measurable results, they’ve created a model that works.
“You’re building a community, where sometimes it’s hard to find a community,” I told him during our conversation. “It’s like one of the hardest things, when you think about it, building communities of people of interest, especially when you get even older, it’s hard to find. But what you’ve done is actually you found this niche, in a way, of these people who care deeply about this, and then you build upon that.”
His response was characteristically forward-thinking: “What is your vision as social media evolves? How do you evolve?”
It’s the right question. And FOA has answers—constantly adapting, expanding, innovating. From pressuring Meta to recognize anti-Zionism as antisemitism, to training volunteers across five continents, to removing extremists like Nick Fuentes, they’re not waiting for the landscape to change. They’re changing it.
“Relationships matter,” I said during our interview.
“Exactly,” Tomer replied. “We want people to know that if you have something bad online, talk with us, send us an email. We do it because we can and we want to help.”
In a year that saw a tsunami of antisemitism crash across the digital landscape, FOA didn’t just build a seawall—they learned to redirect the tide.
To learn more, volunteer, or access free training resources, visit foantisemitism.org. Follow them on Instagram and LinkedIn at “Fighting Online Antisemitism.”
Because in 2025, being a digital activist isn’t optional—it’s essential.
