Jews, please think before you click

The Jewish community in general, and the Zionists among them in particular, are understandably high-strung right now. Political opposition to Israel and intellectual opposition to Zionism have morphed with old-school, publicly displayed antisemitism and progressive doctrinairism to create the most threatening environment for Jews in a generation. Following the October 7 massacre, even before Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, demonstrations in major cities and universities across the world were calling for an end to Israel and a globalization of the intifada. Political leaders, actors, musicians, activists, and students all rallied around the Palestinian flag (and sometimes even the Hamas flag), jumping on the biggest global political bandwagon in my living memory.

Jewish shops, schools, and synagogues are routinely graffitied and attacked, pro-Israel voices are doxed and harassed, and vicious attacks on Jews across the world continue to multiply, from Boulder to Washington, D.C. to Manchester, England. It is no wonder that many in our community are in a state of despair.

So, it should not come as a surprise that, one week after the murderous Bondi Beach attack in which Jews celebrating Chanukah were gunned down, Jewish social media spaces erupted over the killing of an MIT professor of nuclear science, Nuno F. Loureiro, who was widely described online as Jewish and pro-Israel.

The Facebook page “Jewish Lives Matter” wrote, in a 16 December post that was shared almost 4,000 times:

“Another Jewish life lost. Are Jews being targeted???? MIT professor Nuno Loureiro was shot and killed in his home in Brookline, MA. He is Jewish and openly pro-Israel. The suspect remains on the run. Just 48 hours earlier, a shooter opened fire inside a classroom at Brown University, where another Jewish pro-Israel professor was murdered.”

Jews, including several of my Facebook friends, were understandably shocked.

As soon as I read the post, I moved to the New York Times. Convinced that Loureiro was Jewish, I was outraged to read that the Times appeared to omit this crucial detail. I have often been disappointed by the NYT’s coverage of the conflict and its manifestations across the world—and here, I thought, was further evidence that it was denying blatant antisemitism.

But there is a problem.

Professor Loureiro was not Jewish, at least not according to any credible, mainstream reporting. In addition, no Jewish professor was murdered at Brown University. While both events – the Brown attack that killed two (non-Jewish) students and the murder of the MIT professor – are tragic and infuriating, there was no factual basis whatsoever to conflate these events with the Israel-Palestine conflict or with antisemitic violence.

This conflation, a textbook example of social-network misinformation (or disinformation, if intentionally misleading), only served to add fuel to a growing fire, increase distrust and outrage, and generate internet traffic, while distracting us from real problems.

Even now, days after Loureiro’s murder and after the suspect in both the MIT killing and the Brown attack has been identified as a Portuguese classmate of his, only random Facebook pages (“Stop Antisemitism,” “Motivational Success,” and various individuals’ pages), the Israeli press (though thankfully, not The Times of Israel), and partisan news sites (e.g., Yeshiva World) continue to claim that he was Jewish and an Israel supporter. No mainstream media outlets – those that employ professional journalists, fact-checkers, and abide by basic journalistic standards – have confirmed this. His Wikipedia page makes no such mention.

Any attempt to link either of last week’s tragic events to the Israel-Palestine conflict or to antisemitism is therefore purely speculative and unsupported by evidence. If new facts emerge, the story may change. But for now, there was no reason for Jews to add these events to the very real tragedies that our community has been suffering over the past years.

What we witnessed follows a familiar pattern of mis- and disinformation metastasizing:

• A politically oriented outlet asserts an identity or stance

• Aggregators repeat it

• Social media amplifies it

• It begins to feel “known,” even though it was never firmly sourced

The bottom line is this:

My friends, and all patrons of social networks, let this anecdote be a precautionary tale about the dark side of Facebook, X, and all the rest. What started out as a good idea has turned into the greatest conduit of mis- and disinformation on the planet – much of it driven by state and non-state actors who have realized that electronic warfare, some of which targets Israel and Jews in particular, is an effective means of destabilizing democratic societies by weakening social fabric and intercommunal trust.

There is a reason why scrolling through social media makes you angry. It is designed to do exactly that. When you lose sight of this and allow endless hot-button feeds to distract you -and eventually to pull you in – you become a victim, and often an unwitting amplifier, of disinformation campaigns.

We have enough real problems to confront, and a tremendous amount of healing to begin. Becoming conduits for internet hatred and disinformation will only complicate our situation and push any future resolution further out of reach.