May 2026
A Kentucky primary becomes the month’s antisemitic flashpoint.
A defeat for Israel-critic Thomas Massie set off May’s dominant wave of antisemitic content, while the ongoing war in Iran kept an ambient hostility simmering across the American online ecosystem.
Five findings shaped the month
The May 19 Kentucky Republican primary — in which Ed Gallrein took the nomination from Israel critic Thomas Massie — prompted a wave of antisemitic content, while discussion of the war in Iran sustained an environment of ambient antisemitism in certain online communities. Select a finding to jump to its section.
Where the antisemitism lives
Four platforms carry most of the classified volume. Scroll to isolate each platform on the chart, or select one in the legend below it.
Across the month, four platforms dominate the classified dataset. Keep scrolling — the chart isolates each one in turn.
Gab carries the highest volume of antisemitic posts. A space that attracts a large far-right user base, it hosts an environment of pervasive hate — including the casual use of antisemitic slurs in comments on posts unrelated to any specific conspiracy.
High-engagement Tucker Carlson content made YouTube the second-most voluminous source. Unlike the steady, ambient hate elsewhere, YouTube volume emerges in sharp spikes around specific videos — the largest around Carlson’s May 20 video, a smaller one on May 7.
X and 4chan round out the top four. On 4chan in particular, antisemitic rhetoric pervades casual interaction, routinely forging novel hateful terms — a background hum that rises with the month’s wider events.
Illustrative data · daily antisemitic posts by platform, May 2026. On narrow screens the four series read as one chart with the same annotations.
Actual May 2026 figures · count of posts classified as antisemitic, by platform · 22 platforms & forum ecosystems.
Who drives it
To identify the protagonists of this ecosystem, ISD ran a multi-phase pipeline — narrowing hundreds of thousands of posts down to the accounts that persistently amplify antisemitism, then sorting them by driving ideology.
A targeted keyword query surfaced nearly 800,000 posts across 30+ platforms. After removing non-US and zero-engagement content, a bespoke LLM classifier — trained by subject-matter experts on the IHRA definition — left roughly 10,000 accounts.
A minimum-posting threshold of at least ten antisemitic posts then isolated 1,216 accounts and forums that routinely amplify antisemitism to their audiences. This is not an exhaustive census — it is the persistent core.
Illustrative data · account-identification pipeline
The six communities
Select “Read May summary” on a card to expand itRight-wing communities dominate on both counts
Right-wing accounts produced 56,294 posts drawing 2.6 million engagements — an order of magnitude beyond any other community. General conspiracy is a distant second by volume; left-wing and pro-Palestine communities post little but, on individual posts, can still draw outsized engagement.
Illustrative data · square area scaled to value
Distinct communities, shared thematic ground
Communities tend to occupy separate semantic spaces — but a meaningful share of the thematic landscape is genuinely shared across ideological lines, and some volumes move in near-lockstep.
Iran-aligned influence finds a left-wing audience
Iranian influence operations exploit left-wing and pro-Palestine framings of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. Though explicitly antisemitic content from Iran-aligned accounts has fallen since war broke out in February, ISD still observes high-reach Iran-aligned accounts engaging directly with left-wing influencers — injecting antisemitic rhetoric into conversations with cross-community reach.
Two communities, one information environment
Right-wing and general-conspiracy volumes behaved more like each other than any other pair — including near-identical patterns in mentions of the Kentucky primary and candidates Gallrein and Massie, both spiking around May 19.
Figures like Tucker Carlson are a large part of that shared volume — an indicator of the rift on the American right over Israel, pulling parts of the movement toward an increasingly conspiratorial faction.
Where communities share thematic space
Derived from a topic-modelling exercise over the full dataset. Each cell is shaded by how much semantic ground two communities share — a Jaccard-style similarity over the month’s topic clusters. The darkest cell sits at right-wing × general-conspiracy; a second axis links left-wing, hostile state-aligned and pro-Palestine spaces.
Hover a cell for the pair · illustrative values · built to accept the real similarity export.
Twelve narratives, six communities
As Iran-related antisemitism cooled from its February peak, domestic political-influence narratives grew more salient. The mix of narratives looks markedly different depending on which community is speaking.
Illustrative data · numbers are % of that community’s classified content (each column sums to 100) · darker = higher share · hover a cell for detail.
Allegations of Jewish political control and the interpersonal use of antisemitic slurs were consistently among the top narratives, at times moving in parallel. Posts blaming “Jewish warmongering” for the outbreak of conflict featured prominently in the month’s second half — including unfounded claims that specific strikes were “false flags.”
The distribution differs sharply by community. Left-wing content was narrow, with engagement overwhelmingly concentrated on anti-Israel and anti-Zionist antisemitism. Right-wing content spread across political-control conspiracies and classic tropes, with the highest engagement on classic antisemitism after miscellaneous content.
of pro-Palestine antisemitic posts used some form of the phrase — far above other communities.
Violent volume and its drivers
Violent antisemitic content held a steady baseline through May, interrupted by a sharp increase around the May 19 primary — a rise that emerged almost entirely from right-wing and general-conspiracy accounts.
Right-wing accounts advanced the highest volume of violent content, largely thanks to Gab and 4chan — platforms where hateful and violent references are a mundane feature of interaction. On Gab, Holocaust denialism and blood-libel tropes were prominent.
YouTube comment sections produced periodic spikes. Though its baseline violent volume trailed Gab, 4chan and X, certain videos pushed it higher for short bursts — on May 21, in response to Carlson’s May 20 video, violent antisemitic volume on YouTube briefly exceeded every platform but Gab.
The surge in violent antisemitic content that followed the February 28 strikes on Iran has gradually decayed through the spring — its sharpest components were interpersonal antisemitism and anti-Israel or anti-Zionist rhetoric.
The Kentucky primary
The 2026 Republican primary for Kentucky’s 4th district defeated incumbent Thomas Massie — a vocal Israel critic — with Trump-endorsed Ed Gallrein. Covered as the most expensive House primary in US history, the result was read as a referendum on American support for Israel, and became the month’s focal point for antisemitic discourse.
The increase emerged primarily from right-wing and general-conspiracy accounts, with lower-volume participation from pro-Palestine actors and at least two Islamist accounts — one responding directly to Dan Bilzerian. Massie’s own account (@RepThomasMassie) was among the most-engaged in the dataset all month, drawing tags primarily from right-wing actors.
While it drew national audiences, the harassment took on a distinctly local character — concentrated on Kentucky-based users and perceived supporters of Gallrein.
@ky_statesman · 36.1K followers “Anyone who bankrolled Gallrein in KY-04 owes Kentucky an answer. Follow the money, follow the names — you already know who really bought this seat.” ↑ 4,812 reposts · 1.1K quotes
Definitions & notes
The evergreen pipeline — platforms, tooling, the classifier and its validation, and the clustering method — lives on the Methodology page. These appendices carry the definitions and this month’s collection notes.
Appendix I · Definitions
Analysts applied the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, understood in context through its eleven concrete examples. Given the nuance of social-media interaction, ISD applies it as a consistent, practical framework rather than a mechanical test.
The six ideological communities · account counts, May 2026
Appendix II · This month’s collection notes
May 2026 draws on the standing collection across BlueSky, Tumblr, X, online forums (4chan, 8kun, .win communities, Soyjak and others), blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Minds, Rumble, Gettr, Parler and Wimkin. Facebook and 4chan data were down-sampled to 20% due to export limits.
Month-specific note. Coverage of the Kentucky primary relied on keyword expansion around candidate names and KY-04 terms mid-month; comment-section collection on YouTube and Telegram was scaled up around the Carlson videos to support audience analysis. No changes to the classifier or thresholds this issue.