The Honest Take

THT Matthias Becker — corrected transcript
English (US)

00:00:00.000 — 00:00:19.400 · Matthias Becker
People can express overt death wishes, or they can say below the line of an article on George Soros, someone should give George Soros a shower. Right. And here you have the word shower, combined with the name of a Jewish individual, which immediately activates the picture of the gas chambers.

00:00:22.920 — 00:00:41.400 · Ben Chertoff
Welcome to The Honest Take, the show that goes past the headlines to find out what's actually true about Israel and about the people covering it. I'm Ben Chertoff, and my guest today is Doctor Matthias Becker, the man who's training AI to understand the anti-Semitic dog whistles we can't hear.

00:00:46.920 — 00:02:05.390 · Ben Chertoff
When most of us picture anti-Semitism online, we picture a swastika, a slur, or a guy in a dark room. Becker will tell you that's the part that barely matters. He's not a political scientist. He's a linguist. And for over a decade he's been reading the comments, not on fringe platforms — on the BBC, The Guardian, Le Monde. His project, Decoding Antisemitism, has gone through 300,000-plus comments across Britain, France and Germany.

And what he found: 80% of anti-Semitism in those mainstream spaces never uses a slur at all. It hides in a joke, a rhetorical question, a name dropped like a password because the people writing it don't think of themselves as anti-Semites, which means that nearly every statistic you've read about online hate is, in his words, built on sand.

He advises the State Department, the European Commission, the people building the AI meant to catch this, and he was in the data on October 7th, watching something change he'd never seen before. Doctor Matthias Becker. Welcome to The Honest Take.

00:02:06.070 — 00:02:07.350 · Matthias Becker
Thank you for having me.

00:02:08.390 — 00:02:21.150 · Ben Chertoff
So you're a linguist, not a sociologist. Not a political scientist. How does a linguist end up running one of the most rigorous research projects we have on anti-Semitism online?

00:02:22.030 — 00:04:17.459 · Matthias Becker
Well, this is a good question. I guess the correlation between linguistics and discourse analysis and hate studies, um, is not really well known. Uh, most of the projects are looking into digital hate, and conspiracy narratives are done by political scientists, social scientists and so on. But of course, if you want to understand hate speech and, you know, digital hate in particular, and conspiracy narratives and disinformation, of course it is important to look into the pattern with which these these ideas are being communicated.

So my my journey actually really started with, um, racism studies, uh, nationalism studies and how especially in, in Germany, postwar Germany and until the present, how these ideas are being shared, especially in mainstream discourse. Um, because in contrast to, uh, fringe communities, of course, neo-Nazis, white supremacy contexts, these ideas, when they come up, are very often shared, um, through coded speech.

Right, because it would otherwise collide with the positive self images of a speaker. And from a linguistic perspective, it's very interesting to see how these ideas are shared or communicated, what kind of rhetorical devices you can find on the side of the speakers. Um, because, you know, you can of course express an insult, a threat, a death wish.

Incitement to violence. Overtly. Word by word. Um. But you can also say. Say these things in in coded ways. You can imply them. And and that's something that of course, applied linguistics are therefore to actually understand these different communicative patterns, these rhetorical devices that are very often not picked up by

00:04:18.900 — 00:04:41.900 · Matthias Becker
advocacy organizations, by, for instance, policy makers, people who are concerned about the current developments, but you can see in public discourse is a strong focus on on aggressive speech acts on, of course, on overt glorification of violence. But this is just really a tiny part of the repertoire that you can find online.

00:04:42.980 — 00:05:04.420 · Ben Chertoff
You looked into 130,000 comments across the UK, France and Germany in mainstream media content sections. Not These aren't dark web forums that you're scraping for this. They're in the mainstream. Why would you expect to find more there than in the sort of the sewers of the internet?

00:05:05.660 — 00:07:15.409 · Matthias Becker
Well, the premise wouldn't be that we would find automatically more of these hate ideologies, right? Or the or anti-Semitism in particular. And by now the dataset has grown to more than 300,000 user comments. So it's an ongoing process. It's an ongoing journey into into this world, which is, from my perspective, clearly under researched.

Of course, there's a whole range of projects dealing with digital hate, right? Especially when it comes to anti-Semitism, especially after October 7th. The amount of of initiatives, um, grew rapidly. Um, but I would say in the last 20 to 30 years if there was an interest in current current forms of of hate speech.

There was a strong emphasis on fringe communities, especially white supremacy contexts. And I guess there's no surprise that you can find all forms of all sorts of of anti-Semitism and different forms of racism on these platforms. Um, but what is actually happening in mainstream discourse and politically moderate online contexts?

There is not much certainty about that, right? Because it all starts and ends with the identification of a research design. How do you try to understand something that is so complex and so fuzzy, like digital hate in politically moderate contexts? And again, it is completely under researched. And I think this is a huge problem because as soon as we, try to understand anti-Semitism and anti-Semitism that becomes socially acceptable, permissible in in a society like the American one, we need to understand what is acceptable, what seems to be acceptable in mainstream discourse.

Because if anti-Semitism, if the different forms of Jewish hatred become predominant in those online spaces, we really have a problem. I guess fringe communities will always

00:07:16.450 — 00:08:12.720 · Matthias Becker
have to deal with these kind of the, the, these obstacles that, for instance, a a death wish coming from a neo-Nazi will be, you know, won't be able to travel freely within the communication sphere without any sanctions, without any clear forms of rejection. But as soon as it's becoming predominant in in mainstream discourse, then we are living in times when Jew hatred becomes normalized.

And this is a much bigger challenge, and this is a much bigger threat to the American society. Definitely in different European contexts. And that's why I thought this should be the focus. Not so much. White supremacy context. Not so much neo-Nazis, not so much the radical left. But what can we find in the spectrum between conservative, liberal and progressive online contexts?

What is acceptable there? What kind of anti-Semitism and what kind of rhetorical device can you see?

00:08:14.320 — 00:08:37.000 · Ben Chertoff
Most people who don't have to deal with this every day and who don't see this stuff every day. Most people would assume that anti-Semitism online means somebody posting a swastika or, you know, calling somebody a slur like you had mentioned before. What what does your data actually show, and what are you actually looking for, the coded anti-Semitism, as you call it?

00:08:37.240 — 00:08:43.320 · Matthias Becker
Yes. Well, I would say the the approach that we follow is always, um,

00:08:44.480 — 00:09:43.470 · Matthias Becker
uh, is not limited to to coded speech itself. Right? We really want to understand the different antisemitic stereotypes and concepts in general. So also Holocaust distortion, Israel-related anti-Semitism on the basis of certain demonizing analogies. Um, speech acts like the glorification of violence that we could see after October 7th.

Um, and here, uh, the approach would always be to identify these different concepts, these different ideas about Jews, and then to see how these ideas are being shared. Is it a metaphor? Is it? Is it some kind of an indirect speech act like a rhetorical question, for instance. Um, so people can, for instance, say Jews exploit the Holocaust for financial gain, right?

Or they can just ask a rhetorical question, for instance, who's holding out their hand again? Uh, below the line of a of an article about the culture of memory in Germany or Europe in general,

00:09:44.510 — 00:15:59.680 · Matthias Becker
people can express overt death wishes, or they can say below the line of an article on George Soros, someone should give George Soros a shower. Right. And here you have the word shower combined with the name of a Jewish individual, which, if there is sufficient historical knowledge and awareness, immediately activates the picture of the gas chambers.

So you don't have a clear reference to to death and to destruction. You can just use all sorts of allusions and puns to to activate a hateful idea. In that case, this would be a coded death wish. And what we can see when we, uh, when we went through all these comment sections in the context of mainstream news outlets in Europe, and in this context, there was particularly the UK, Germany and France we were focusing on, um, we could easily find, uh, like average average values where, like 20 to 25%.

Antisemitism below the line. Of these news outlets or their articles. But then we could identify. Among these antisemitic comments, we could identify a whole range of. Implicit examples. And sometimes in the context of the BBC or The Guardian. If you could find like 20% antisemitic tropes in the comment section.

Sometimes more than 80% of these were communicated in implicit ways. And that tells us something quite alarming, which is that. All these statistical overviews that we have, all these claims that we now have. Widespread anti-Semitism online is are very often built on sand, because they follow these predefined understanding of how the idea of Jewish power or Holocaust distortion, or the idea that Israel would be the new Nazi state, that all these things are referred to explicitly by slurs or by statistically significant words.

But of course, this is not the case when you do qualitative close reading. When you go through the comment section and you see that there's a whole range of words and phrases that can activate the idea of Israel being a child murdering state. Right. Um, or uh, again, the idea that the Holocaust never happened.

You have the whole repertoire of human language to activate these ideas. So and there's no, again, no statistically significant, um, realm of of of words that over time come up. If you are interested in the apartheid analogy or in the claim that Israel would, um, commit Genocide. Then I guess you have a high probability that you can understand that the overall extent of these claims, because people usually refer to these ideas by using these words.

But of course, stereotypes are age old images about Jews, usually negative character traits. And of course, you can claim these things about Jewish deceit and hypocrisy and immorality in a million different ways. So what we need to do is to to understand the variety, the complexity, the diversity of these, um, of these statements and find ways to to measure these references in the aggregate in order to say something substantial about, about anti-Semitism.

So I guess one of the main observations that we could, uh, make over the time of the since 2020 and even before. I mean, I've been working in the field for more than 14 years. Uh, is that the beginning or the the starting point of all these, of this kind of research has to be an interdisciplinary, qualitative one so that you understand, okay, this is for instance, um, a news article about October 7th or Bondi Beach or, um, the news coverage about the decision a few weeks ago, um, that you actually go through the digital aftermath qualitatively, qualitatively, with your knowledge as a, as an expert, with your historical awareness, with your awareness about how language works and to to classify what kind of tropes you can find and how are they communicated in different ways through language, but also through imagery or multi multi multimodal ways.

So. And and as soon as you have a clear understanding of these discursive trends, you can use that as the basis for, um, for training large language models or to, to, to actually to get to the point that these models are actually able to replicate your decision so that you can not only dig deep and understand the full extent of, of these rhetorical devices, but that you can also say something representative through the scaling process.

And I think this is this is a really central observation. Antisemitism is a hate ideology. And if you're interested in the presence of digital hate in politically moderate contexts, you have to understand that people very often avoid, um, explicit references. They because it would collide with their positive self images.

So therefore that is instrumental for your research design. You have to understand that this is the thing. This is a pattern that you can find in different language communities in different countries. As soon as you dive into politically moderate contexts. You have to see the diversity of these statements.

And then, um, you can actually say something substantial about the real dimension of true hatred, uh, in those conversations.

00:16:00.000 — 00:16:34.080 · Ben Chertoff
And a lot of this. You mentioned training LLMs. Um, a lot of these coded words. Um, you know, you also talked about the negative self-image and people wanting to avoid that. But I think some of it must also just be to avoid our legacy forms of content moderation, which relied on things like keywords. Um, so when you start to code it, it gets through those content moderations.

Is that right? Am I? Am I understanding that correctly?

00:16:34.520 — 00:20:02.820 · Matthias Becker
Yes. Yes, absolutely. So I guess this definitely plays a major role. Um, especially in the past when content moderation was, uh, more dominant. Because now, as we all know, social media companies took a step back. Um, and, uh, there are Community Notes, and, and it's kind of based on a shared, uh, knowledge about, like, what hate speech actually is that these interventions are actually happening.

And of course, you have the, the, the system of trusted flaggers, um, uh, who, who give recommendations about like what should be taken down. But in general, this kind of regulation is definitely not as prevalent as it should be. But I would also argue that, uh, content moderation is just one factor among many, right?

It's something that we can definitely identify, even in fringe communities in in the context of white supremacy platforms, it's also a high presence of these coded statements. And why is that? There's basically no content moderation whatsoever in those online spaces. So the reason why why you can find these, um, coded forms of, of, of digital hate and conspiratorial thinking on those platforms is because it's attractive, because it is attractive to say something like, you know, we allude to the idea that Jews would control the White House or Hollywood, but not, again, not a word not explicitly, but through certain innuendo or through metaphors that not everyone understands.

Right. It's a little bit of the whole thing. When you think of the Matrix movie, The blue and the Red pill. If you understand what is really. If you are able to understand what is really happening in the world and you want to share it with your own peer group, and you want to do it in a in a compelling way, you use some kind of a, um, a communicative function that not everyone around you understands because that builds a stronger like, um, communicative proximity between yourself and the peer group.

You want to reach out to. And at the same time, you can imply that the society around you doesn't get it right. So this is also a way of, um — of course, dog whistles would be another — would be another term for that, that you just create a stronger bond between yourself and the people you want to, you want to reach with your message.

So this is a very central aspect. Content moderation is definitely part Of of these trends. And of course, in offline context, there was always the, the a high probability that you you might get sanctioned if you spread hateful ideas. But, um, it is just one side of the story. And this is something that we need to understand.

And if we want to understand how these things evolve over time, we need to build systems that can, um, understand these allusions, these jokes, these different metaphors, metaphorical phrases, um, the way they appear in, in conversations.

00:20:03.740 — 00:20:26.020 · Ben Chertoff
I want to get into the data because you have been studying this for years now. Much of your research was before October 7th. Can you walk me through what you saw? The difference between, uh, what how this online anti-Semitism presented itself before October 7th and then what you saw real time, uh, During and after.

What changed?

00:20:27.420 — 00:20:28.260 · Ben Chertoff
Yes.

00:20:28.420 — 00:20:45.460 · Matthias Becker
Um, yeah. This was definitely a turning point. October 7th. Um, so I've been I've been interested in Israeli related antisemitism for quite some time now. I also did my PhD about this, um, a comparison between Germany and the UK and, um,

00:20:47.220 — 00:21:28.290 · Matthias Becker
uh, what we could see already in 2012. Uh, autumn 2012. Summer 2014, May 2021. All of these were escalation phases in the Middle East conflict. Right. And something that you could observe over the years was as soon as there was an escalation in the conflict within the conflict, um, stereotypes and, and, uh, demonizing analogies like the Nazi analogy, uh, went up, went through the roof.

Uh, there was a clearer, uh, correlation between the two sides. And so it was not surprising to see, you know, for instance, in summer 2014, that. For instance, allegations of Israelis

00:21:29.490 — 00:23:16.850 · Matthias Becker
trying to find a the the the final solution, um, of the Palestinian question and phrases like that, we're just very, very present in, in online communication. Um, on October 7th, that has changed completely. So it was not so much the projection of stereotypes and analogies onto the Jewish state, uh, onto the Jewish outgroup.

But these were there were a lot of forms of so-called self positioning. So people weren't actually saying, you know, Jews are evil, and that's why I hate them, or that's why I'm in favor of the destruction of the Jewish state. People started or reacted to the pictures on that day, to the to the, uh, clips and images that were circulating by, um, glorifying, glorifying like what they saw.

So there was an open celebration of, uh, of that kind of violence and murder and slaughter and in a way that I've never seen before. So from moving away from projections towards, um, self positioning, towards an open affirmation of, uh, the cruelty on that day, and that's something that, that could be that was echoed by various research projects, not only mine, we we published a, a case study two weeks after October 7th.

I think it was the first study that came out about the online reactions. And the study was called, uh, it's called Celebrating Terror. And that kind of is, in a nutshell, what we could see that, um, again, it was not the projective element that is so central

00:23:17.930 — 00:24:30.240 · Matthias Becker
in the context of anti-Semitism as a hate ideology. But it was it was statements like. I'm I'm so happy about what I see. This should happen from now on in the next 60 years. Right. And maybe afterwards you could actually see these stereotypes and analogies, analogies coming along. But it was clearly the brutality of, uh, the reports coming from southern Israel that triggered, uh, an open and open celebration among, uh, web users and that definitely stayed part of even mainstream discourse over the course of the following weeks.

Over time, as soon as the military operation of the IDF started in Gaza, uh, you could see that the old projections returned. But the aspect of, of like affirmation, celebration, glorification of violence, the justification, of course, that really remained part of even politically moderate contexts, and something else that we could observe was the overlap between anti-Semitism and misogyny and affirmation.

00:24:30.400 — 00:24:30.480 · Ben Chertoff
Of.

00:24:31.080 — 00:26:14.350 · Matthias Becker
Gender based violence. Right. If you think of the female festival goers, and it doesn't matter if we look into the comment sections in France, in the UK or in Germany, which again at that time was the the focus of my work of the decoding anti-Semitism project. Um, there was a clear overlap between anti-Semitism and misogyny in a way that I've never seen before.

The statements were not just saying, um, these female festival goers deserved what they you know, what, they got a day. Um, but it was even to some extent, um, pornographic, um, uh, verbiage that you could find in the comment sections. And, um, this is something that was quite new, something unexpected for my research team at that time, especially since antisemitism and mainstream discourse very often doesn't overlap with other hate ideologies.

Quite often, you know, there's an anti-Semitic statement coming from someone, and there's counter speech from someone who has a problem with anti-Semitism, but might at the same time reproduce racist stereotypes. So you have this kind of juxtaposition right between these two sides. It's more kind of a phenomenon of right wing fringe discourse that anti-Semitism and racism overlap.

For instance, when you think of a great replacement theory where these two belief systems come together and are intertwined, um, but usually anti-Semitism as a hate ideology stands on its own feet in mainstream discourse. And that definitely changed on that day.

00:26:15.870 — 00:26:39.350 · Ben Chertoff
After October 7th, you started doing what you call event studies, these real time analyzes after a major violent event. Can you walk me through what you found? After studying Charlie, the Charlie Kirk killing, the Capital Jewish Museum shooting, and then the White House Correspondents Dinner attack?

00:26:40.670 — 00:26:54.469 · Matthias Becker
Yes, certainly. Uh, what we could see, especially on, uh, everything related to Charlie Kirk, was, uh, this was a quite interesting case study because, um, there was a strong

00:26:55.830 — 00:27:02.469 · Matthias Becker
also there, strong affirmation of political violence on that day. Um, so

00:27:03.470 — 00:29:55.889 · Matthias Becker
everything that we could identify in previous case studies, because case studies were always some, some like a central part of of our work. Because if you acknowledge that you can only say something substantial about anti-Semitism, all its forms, that you need to have a fine grained, granular approach to it, the best way you can you can actually approach the topic of digital hate is by identifying something like a discourse event, and then look at the online reactions that followed.

So this is definitely a very helpful approach to make good use of your time as a researcher and to understand how different, um, different discourse events trigger different forms of anti-Semitism. So on that day, um, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, uh, there was clearly, uh, an abundance of, um, affirmation of political violence in combination, of course, with conspiracy narratives.

uh, I guess the most famous example for conspiratorial thinking in that regard to this discourse event is, um, Candace Owens, but not only her and her followers and, and, um, influencers that are connected with her. Um, even outside that realm. You could just see a really a high like an omnipresence of of of of these conspiratorial ideas after that.

As you mentioned, we conducted a range of studies. Of course, Bondi Beach was always a big topic. Um, we, uh, had the White House, uh, dinner shooting. Um, Dan Bilzerian and I mentioned him before all these case studies. Um, have something in common. They emphasize the the the high presence of of these conspiracy theories in mainstream discourse.

There's also some really interesting observation. There was, uh, last summer, the the the conflict between Iran and Israel escalated. Uh, Israel was the dominant, um, uh, factor when we think of the US Israeli relations at the time, um, getting, getting engaged in, in, in, in this kind of war, uh, against Iran.

And of course, when you look at the online reactions during these days, there was a whole bunch of demonization of Israel, um, in conservative but also in progressive contexts and liberal contexts. There was a clear focus on American news outlets and their followers. And

00:29:57.010 — 00:30:07.130 · Matthias Becker
when you compare these results with the online reactions to, um, February-March this year, when actually the US starting

00:30:08.210 — 00:30:15.969 · Matthias Becker
to be involved in that war. You could see that there was a clear shift from these standard, like demonizing patterns

00:30:16.970 — 00:30:48.610 · Matthias Becker
directed against the Jewish state towards conspiratorial thinking, which is, you know, understandable, which makes perfect sense. Uh, given that from from that moment onwards, uh, America played, like, a very, very active role, a very central role in that war. And so you can you can actually understand that kind of shift from standard demonization towards something that is still compatible with,

00:30:49.690 — 00:33:17.189 · Matthias Becker
with the intent to, to, to demonize Jews, but at the same time to make sure that, um, it's not per se directed against your own country as an American. Right? So if America if the US is doing something that again collides with a positive self-image. Um, the only explanation you can, you can push is that this is happening because of the orchestration of an external state in this regard.

This would be Israel. So, and that's, that's really the interesting part of it. I already mentioned the comparison between, um, the different escalation phases in the Middle East conflict and how, you know, in different years, the repertoire of demonization shifts. Um, this whole conflict with Iran since last summer tells you the exact same story.

The geopolitical constellations change, um, the way in which, uh, mainstream media report on, on these, on these events might have shifted as well. And then you can see a clear effect on the, uh, on the on the reactions. You can see in, in on that debate culture and that actually makes this kind of fine grained, um, granular linguistic analysis so, so powerful because you see, you see the context, you see a discourse event, you see the you you try to comprehend the reactions that you can find among web users, and that helps you understand what is actually driving your own society.

Right? Because language on digital communication always echoes, uh, collective attitudes. So if there's a if there's a certain shift in those, in those attitudes, you can reconstruct these shifts by looking at the, um, predominant patterns of communication in online discourse. Online discourse is obviously the marketplace of ideas these days.

This is where things are happening. I would be very cautious when it comes to surveys that try to understand the presence of different ideologies, because again, we have factors of social desirability. We have priming effects. Surveys

00:33:18.550 — 00:33:23.110 · Matthias Becker
represent highly artificial situations where people just, you know, get get it.

00:33:23.270 — 00:33:34.670 · Ben Chertoff
You're talking about surveys where somebody calls up and says, what do you think about the Jews? Somebody is not likely to answer that as honestly as a wink and a nod on a comment section anonymously?

00:33:34.710 — 00:35:12.700 · Matthias Becker
Yes. Yes, exactly. Even if it's, you know, if even if it's, um, if it's I mean, in general, these are anonymous, um, and anonymous contexts, right? There's there's no question about that. But, you know, looking like knowing that it is some kind of a cultural norm to, to reject, Um. Uh. Prejudice. Hateful thinking.

Uh, generalizations. Essentializations. All these things are clearly, uh, within a certain percentage among, uh, within a society are clearly rejected phenomena. So if you ask these questions and it's not about, like, perceptions of a certain hate ideology within a minority, there you can be certain that the responses are pretty straightforward and and are authentic.

But if you ask the majority of society what they really think about this or that minority, the probability probability is rather high that, uh, the results are pretty distorted. And because it is, again, this kind of artificial situation. And even though you are anonymous, they are still factors that determine your reaction.

Like again social desirability. So therefore I would always take these results with a grain of salt. I would always make sure, um, to emphasize if if you want to, if you want to understand what is driving your own society, what is happening at the moment,

00:35:13.860 — 00:36:10.060 · Matthias Becker
you you get far more reliable results if you analyze self-motivated statements. And in that case, digital communication, online discourse is self-motivated. So you have this kind of discourse event. People are looking at some kind of media coverage, and then they want to position themselves to that problem, and they use it.

And they they do this in very particular ways. Right? They, they they sometimes do it very overtly and sometimes they use coded which uh, or multimodal patterns. Um, and the reasons for this or that choice can be reconstructed over time, but it's not the primary thing. The primary interest on our side would be if there is this discourse event in this specific measurement period, what are the the concepts of stereotypes, um, with which web users react to that?

00:36:10.100 — 00:36:37.460 · Ben Chertoff
You mentioned the misogyny in and the overlap of misogyny and anti-Semitism, and it just makes me think of the the term manosphere and the anti-Semitism that seems baked into so many of those influencers. You had, uh, analyzed the Dan Bilzerian announcement that he's running for Congress in Florida, and he ran a study on the comment sections there under that coverage.

What did what did you find?

00:36:39.020 — 00:36:39.699 · Matthias Becker
So

00:36:41.100 — 00:36:56.129 · Matthias Becker
something that was really, really interesting in this context was, um, that Dan Bilzerian, you know, the so-called king of Instagram or former king of Instagram, um, That his ideas were

00:36:57.530 — 00:37:12.090 · Matthias Becker
very, very welcome among a different target audiences. Right. He was invited. He was invited by George Galloway, a British politician, clearly a left-wing, uh, anti-imperialist,

00:37:13.250 — 00:38:15.169 · Matthias Becker
uh, politician or public figure. Uh, and of course, at the same time he was invited by, by other hosts who you might identify with with the manosphere. Um, or clearly like right wing influencers and, um, it was there was a clearer, um, uh, appreciation for what Bilzerian had to say about, like, what is actually happening right now here in the US.

And one central aspect was, of course, that he thinks that there is something like Jewish supremacy that is the biggest threat for American society, for the world in general. Um, he, uh, challenged or he's challenging, um, another, uh, politician, a Jewish politician that he very often called, um, uh, “fat Jew”.

Um, different forms of demonization and conspiratorial thinking, uh, came from him. And

00:38:16.450 — 00:39:17.009 · Matthias Becker
throughout all these comments sections that we analyzed, uh, in each case around 3,000 comments, we could see that there was strong appreciation for this kind of, uh, scenario, right, for this kind of, um, defamation and, uh, of course, engagement in, in digital anti-Semitism, the overall amount of, of and of confirmation or even just reproduction of anti-Semitic tropes, in particular conspiracy theories was, uh, really mind boggling.

So even the smallest, uh, the lowest level of anti-Semitism in that context was still much higher than the average amount of anti-Semitism we could find in the context of other discourse events. So here you could see that you don't even need a specific event. For instance, an anti-Semitic incident, uh, somewhere in Brooklyn or in the streets of London or

00:39:18.010 — 00:39:24.610 · Matthias Becker
whatever you're interested in, it is just some kind of a statement that has been pushed by

00:39:25.970 — 00:40:03.520 · Matthias Becker
a public figure like Dan Bilzerian that leads to a huge amount of of, um, uh, anti-Semitic rhetoric in the comment sections. And it's interesting that, like, one of the most interesting observations was that in one of these channels that we analyzed, uh, one of these YouTube channels, There was a clear rejection of their positions.

Right? There was there was a clear attempt to say, you can't call your your opponent the “fat Jew” because this represents anti-Semitism. And

00:40:04.640 — 00:40:11.960 · Matthias Becker
below the line of that clip, there was the highest amount of anti-Semitic rhetoric, more than 50%.

00:40:12.080 — 00:40:12.720 · Ben Chertoff
Wow.

00:40:12.720 — 00:40:18.039 · Matthias Becker
And that tells us something that, um, is very often

00:40:20.040 — 00:44:27.380 · Matthias Becker
not really well understood, um, which is the responsibility, the responsibility, uh, like from coming from a, from on the side of the host, what that person should actually bring to attention. Right. I remember there was a big debate a few a few years ago between, uh, Lex Fridman and Sam Harris about, um, the fact that Fridman invited Kanye West to his show.

And Sam Harris was I remember well. Very, very straightforward with his critique and said, maybe it's not a good idea to give someone with these ideas or his affirmation appreciation for Adolf Hitler to give that person a microphone. Right. It doesn't really matter how you, as a host, uh, try to dismantle all these ideas because you, you still you you you start like, being engaged in something that you cannot really control because you give that person the opportunity to share their viewpoints, and therefore, you become an enabler of these normalized trends in even a mainstream discourse.

And I would say, I'm not sure if Lex Fridman actually understood that critique at that time, but in this case study that we conducted was a proof for the fact that even if you if you interrupt your podcast guest. After each sentence, we say and emphasize that this is actually an expression of an age old hate ideology.

It's not always clear. It's not. You cannot guarantee that the message, um, is getting to the target that the person had in mind. Right. Because it is it is a language. And communication in general is very often working unconsciously. Or, you know, when we think of imagery, for instance, if you if you stand in front of a school class and you, you want to, you know, you want to criticize or you want to you want to deconstruct what anti-Semitic propaganda is, and you show a couple of cartoons that you say, this is bad because X, Y, and Z.

Um, you cannot guarantee that this is really the message your students go out with, uh, because images work on their own way. Their own way. They work unconsciously. The same was true with with with language in general. um, if you just give that person a microphone and the opportunity to share these ideas, then, um, you, you, you participate in this whole arrangement.

Of course, I wouldn't say that. I'm against the idea of, like, presenting hateful ideas and proclaiming them and deconstruct them and so on, but it has to happen in a very, I would say, in a very moderate and a very controlled, uh, scenario. Otherwise, you just have it just leads to a lot of really, um, uh, negative effects on, on, on our society.

And our society today is very much like, framed or determined by these, by this kind of completely unlimited discourse that we can see right through social media, through the communication conditions that you have online, that people can actually say whatever they want. There's no accountability.

And of course, slowly but steadily, certain ideas become more and more predominant because there are actually no gatekeepers. So anyone can say whatever they want. And and language and discourse, of course, lead to, um, to attitudes, to sentiment. That's you know, the history of Germany shows shows this to us.

Antisemitism was a normal part of everyday culture. So if it's already part of a discourse, it's only a tiny step to physical violence, to institutionalized violence. And so this whole topic of like, how do we actually draw the line? What should be part of the conversation?

00:44:28.460 — 00:45:17.860 · Matthias Becker
Um, I'm not sure if anything that is out there, uh, should just be presented in, in one way or another with the headline. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, right? Because if we talk about this, we can dismantle it. We get rid of that idea. I think a language and the idea of ideology at the ideological basis for specific forms of discourse, uh, cannot be, um, controlled in any possible.

Like every minute. Right. I think we should we have a responsibility for what we actually present to our audience. And, um, and, uh, if, if we, if we invite people like Alex Jones or Kanye West or in that case, back then,

00:45:19.140 — 00:45:41.130 · Matthias Becker
um, it isn't it is again, it is not always clear that we actually achieve our goals by just confronting the person with the truth or with, um, a well-balanced opinion, because the narratives, the more aggressively the narrative is, the more, uh, probable is the success of the person that utters these ideas.

00:45:41.890 — 00:46:11.410 · Ben Chertoff
And also the. It's such a it's such a common move of these conspiratorial people like Alex Jones is if I'm getting pushback, that means I'm right. And it seems to be, you know, one of the things that they take to prop up their argument is that the more flack they get, the the more they're over the target. I think, is is the Alex Jones term about that?

The pushback makes it worse. Is what you found.

00:46:11.450 — 00:46:29.850 · Matthias Becker
The the the amount of of of anti-Semitism was definitely higher in, in that particular episode than in those cases where people were just, um, you know, appreciating the, the, the courage of Bilzerian. So that's a very interesting empirical observation.

00:46:31.210 — 00:46:32.250 · Ben Chertoff
The, um,

00:46:33.290 — 00:46:53.250 · Ben Chertoff
you know, a lot of conversations with my wife, for instance. We will comfort ourselves by saying, well, a lot of this is just online discourse and people online are crazy. How much correlation is there, do you think, between the online discourse and offline action?

00:46:55.010 — 00:47:28.930 · Matthias Becker
Wow. Yeah, this is a very good question. And so far nobody can actually like reliably answer that question. Of course, there are attempts to, you know, then if you think of, um, the, uh, the shootings, for instance, in Pittsburgh or in Germany, in Halle, or Christchurch, that after these, um, after these crimes, people were looking into the to the statements of the perpetrators.

Right. And, and the manifestos and so on. The same was true with Washington, DC in 2025. Um,

00:47:30.410 — 00:47:40.360 · Matthias Becker
so there are attempts to, to to look at the correlations between the two. But at the moment we still don't have absolute certainty about these. Like how, how

00:47:41.440 — 00:48:03.480 · Matthias Becker
how much kind of overlap you can identify. Because for that you would always need to have, um, a very precise bird's-eye view on the reality in online discourse, in online communication. And if a model, if you still don't have that at the moment when we talk about social media studies, digital hate studies, you name it, it is um,

00:48:05.400 — 00:48:07.279 · Matthias Becker
most of the publications are

00:48:08.360 — 00:49:01.400 · Matthias Becker
clearly exploratory because either you just focus on a specific online environment or, you know, specific influencers. And through reactions, these influencers got, um, or you try to cover this as much data as possible, but then your understanding of verbal violence and conspiratorial thinking, uh, is rather superficial because the bigger your dataset gets.

The more limited are your your your tools to actually comprehend the different patterns. Right. So so usually most of the most of the studies or case studies in the field of digital hate research are focused on slurs. Right. As I mentioned at the beginning. And so slogans that always that always repeat themselves.

But for, for people who

00:49:02.720 — 00:49:25.999 · Matthias Becker
who are actually planning something like an attack on a, for instance, on a synagogue, um, um, there of course, the statements coming from, from these individuals need to need to be analyzed in more detail. Right. And you need to take into account especially the aspect of, again, conspiracy theories, because conspiracy theories in themselves are

00:49:27.200 — 00:50:19.950 · Matthias Becker
far more alarming than just Expressing demonizing stereotypes about Jews, for instance, because stereotypes are very often based on the idea, okay, these people are, uh, inferior or they are just, you know, they have no moral compass, you know, clearly constructions of difference. Whereas conspiracy conspiracy theories always imply something like, um, we would call a self victimization, because when you think of a perpetrator in Pittsburgh, you know, he was completely hijacked by the great replacement theory and the Great replacement theory, just as other antisemitic conspiracy theories are based on the idea that there is some kind of a Jewish lobby, uh.

00:50:22.630 — 00:51:26.790 · Matthias Becker
Powerful lobby that operates in the dark behind the curtains. And you don't know what will happen next to you, to your family, to your to your respective in-group. So the aspect of self victimization is extremely central for, um, conspiracy narratives and of course connected to these ideas of, of like.

That you and you are kind of represent victims. Um, are emotions like fear, anxiety. Right. You are not. It's not so much based on hate, on on hate or disdain and related emotions, but actually fear that you might actually lose everything. And as soon as a collective starts, um, like being hijacked by the emotions, the probability of physical violence is going up.

Right. So, so looking at conspiracy theories and all and of course, people who think that the great replacement theory is true or,

00:51:27.820 — 00:51:32.260 · Matthias Becker
um, I don't know, for instance, that, um, uh,

00:51:33.780 — 00:54:42.330 · Matthias Becker
uh, Charlie Kirk was killed by the Mossad, for instance. And, you know, you don't know what's going to happen next. Quite interesting. Also in our case study about Dan Bilzerian. Uh, they were statements like, uh, remember that Dan is not suicidal. Right. Which is a very interesting way of, like, alluding to the fact that, um, he might be dead tomorrow and we all know who is responsible for that.

He's not suicidal. And and so if this is the scenario you as a web user draw every day, or you get confronted with every day, you think yourself like living in a, in a, in a society that is controlled by something that you cannot see, that you cannot understand. And of course, the the next step is fear and, um, lack of control.

And of course, we need to get our control back. Right. And so this shows pretty well how conspiratorial thinking is. As soon as it's actually getting normalized in various online environments and can actually lead to real world harm and violence in a way that standard stereotypes, prejudices, uh, cannot.

And and so I think I mean, I only partially answered your question. I think it's, it's it's very important to understand that the, um, that our instruments, our tools to, to understand digital hate and all its forms are much better than two years ago, thanks to the technological possibilities we have today.

But of course, the bottleneck is still can these models, these classification models understand these different patterns of hate? Are they actually able to identify the stereotype of, um, Jewish power? And how do they draw the line between criticism of lobbying versus, again, conspiracy theories about Jewish organizations?

All right. And then models need to learn that. And for that you need expert annotation. That brings us back to my project and projects from from other research centers. It is absolutely important that you test these models, that they perform well. And as soon as they are able to do that, we could actually answer these questions about the correlation between online hate speech and offline violence.

Before that, it is very often just an exploratory attempt to to understand these correlations. These correlations are certainly there, but we are definitely not yet at that point to, to predict, uh, this kind of violence that very often comes from lone wolves. Right. I wrote an article about the issue that a lot of law enforcement agencies are pretty much focused on aspects of, or approaches like social network analysis, trying to understand how different actors, radicalized actors, extremists, potentially terrorists, even how they, um,

00:54:43.370 — 00:56:18.480 · Matthias Becker
how they prepare themselves for, uh, certain crimes. And this is very often based on the way in which these different actors cooperate, right? How they actually how they, you know, interact online. Right. And how much they are actually organized in certain groups, etc.. But in times when a lot of people who, uh, engage in this kind of violence get radicalized in the first place within their online community, within their peer group, and they just read every day what I said before they read every day about, um, their country going down because of some kind of lobby.

Um, and they just take all that in until it's kind of accumulating to a, like a comprehensive worldview where only one thing can help us get out of this vicious cycle. Uh, the only thing you can actually anticipate that something bad is happening, that this person is planning something atrocious, um, is based on, on the way this person expresses themselves online.

Right. It's a language that actually tells you, okay, this person is completely like drowning in conspiratorial thinking. Therefore, the probability is high that something could happen. You never know 100%. But it's the language, the discourse itself, that could shed some light and help us predict, uh, future forms of offline violence that we.

We cannot even comprehend this in this moment.

00:56:19.680 — 00:56:42.760 · Ben Chertoff
You. I want to get into some of the solution here. AI content moderation is supposedly advancing very quickly. You just alluded to that. You. If I'm not mistaken, you are advising some of the larger tech companies. Also the US State Department. Um, what

00:56:43.920 — 00:56:53.160 · Ben Chertoff
do you tell them when they ask you what we should do differently? What what are you telling these companies and governments?

00:56:54.440 — 00:57:30.630 · Matthias Becker
So, um, first of all, these advisory activities are clearly, uh, they they definitely happened at a certain time frame. At the moment, uh, I'm mainly focused on, uh, advising, uh, different research centers. Uh, so we don't have ongoing collaboration with social media companies. What we are actually trying to establish these days is a closer link to AI companies.

Um, in order to help them improve their, uh, their guardrails of their models. Um, because very often, uh, domain expertise is not really part of.

00:57:30.670 — 00:57:54.150 · Ben Chertoff
Are they open to it? Because I know that, you know, Wikipedia is a stumbling block and Reddit is a stumbling block because they feed these large language models their, their information. Um, so yeah, I'm interested are the, you know, is Anthropic — not to name names? Are are the AI companies in general? Have you.

Have you gotten any positive feeling from them about this?

00:57:54.190 — 01:02:04.090 · Matthias Becker
I can't say much about this at this point, but I will definitely, uh, hopefully at our next conversation. But it's definitely, I would say just from a very naive perspective, it is, um, I think the chances are much better to, to actually move in a good direction than, uh, with the conversations we've had with social media companies.

You know, I can't generalize at this point, but I would say, given that in social media discourse, a lot of engagement is actually really coming from like pushing certain like negative emotions. This is, I would say, not really an incentive or the business model from, from AI companies on the side of AI companies.

So I think there's definitely a higher probability to move in a good direction when when it comes to other research centers, um, the thing or the approach that we follow is very often to, to to think about digital hate in new ways. For instance, I'm working very closely with AddressHate, a think tank here in New York, um, that uh, tries to, um, strengthen the, the, the connection between the different research centers in the US, but also in North America, in Europe to bring actually these different researchers together who look, for instance, into discourse like what I do, or people who are interested in malicious actors — right, about bot farms and orchestration, and those organizations or research centers who are interested in algorithmic amplification, to actually have an ongoing dialog between these different parties, between these different centers of expertise.

Because this is a guess, uh, I would think the the basis for a research community that is able to understand these current trends on, on various levels and inform the different target groups like education, like policymakers, like legal experts platforms, but also law enforcement agencies. We have to understand that, again, human beings communicate these Exclusionary ideas in a million different ways, and we need to accept the fact that it takes time to generate training data, to build data sets that are helpful for creating external knowledge bases for large language models, so that these models over time understand, um, the different again, the different layers, the different communicative patterns of digital hate so that they can replicate our decisions.

That's, that's, I guess, the missing part. Um, so today we have opportunities to get raw data in different ways, right through social listening companies and so on. On the other hand, we have we are technologically extremely advanced. We have large language models that understand irony to some extent, that understand jokes, that understand all sorts of rhetorical devices that could have never been covered a few years ago with a high precision.

But what is definitely missing is this middle part that you bring in experts from, like experts on these different belief systems from a historical and contemporary standpoint. People who work in communication science, who work in psychology, who work in media studies, who actually take all their theoretical knowledge and, um, apply it to to online discourse and over time to, to inform or to, to, to, to give, to build some kind of a basis, the foundation for the models to understand how these different belief systems are being shared.

This is the most important part and this is at the moment the weakest part in the whole pipeline.

01:02:04.130 — 01:02:20.930 · Ben Chertoff
You spend your days in comment sections reading hatred and quantifying it and coding it. And you've been doing this for years. How do you keep yourself from going down a terrible rabbit hole of despair?

01:02:21.850 — 01:02:48.570 · Matthias Becker
Oh, this is a this is a very good question. I think at the beginning, um, yeah, more than ten years ago, it was pretty hard. It was pretty difficult because at that time I was very much focused on on extremist content. And of course, this has like really a clear effect on you as a researcher. Right? This is a this is of course, there are coping mechanisms and people get used to it or, you know, which is, uh,

01:02:50.530 — 01:03:38.040 · Matthias Becker
they just manage and maybe create some kind of a cynicism. And fortunately, this is not a destiny that I share. Um, I think it was pretty helpful for me to move away a little bit from the very like extreme forms of radicalized online environments, and to focus a little bit more on mainstream discourse, because if you even though the underlying concepts, the stereotypes are basically the same, just the rhetorical, the communicative appearance, like through the implicitness that I mentioned before, um, helps you, uh, deal with these, these phenomena.

But at the same time, it is also just the observation

01:03:39.120 — 01:04:14.320 · Matthias Becker
that you actually learn a lot about your own society or the society. You, you, you do your research on. Right. It's it's again, it's a social media studies if you do it right. If you bring in the right disciplinary frameworks, um, social media studies can really be some kind of a magnifying glass for, um, attitudes and sentiment and overall dynamics within.

Within a language community. Within. Within a. Within a country. Um, this is something that I,

01:04:15.760 — 01:06:02.110 · Matthias Becker
I think is extremely insightful. Also like just looking at anti-Semitism, right. Anti-Semitism is not about Jews. It's always about the anti-Semites. It's always about what what is going on in in a society like the American one these days, when there seems to be kind of a complete like lack of orientation on the political level, or the question about the war on Iran and all these projections that you can find online.

I think this is always the basis for understanding the, um, the current state of American democracy. And, you know, obviously there are lots of correlations between anti-Semitism and anti-democratic resentment. Right? It's in Germany, in a country like Germany. It is. It goes without saying. If you if you if you study antisemitism, you also move.

You take like a huge leap forward in like understanding the current state of democracy. Right? Because antisemitism is clearly connected to ideas of anti-elitism, that you don't believe that this institution is doing something that is good for the community, for for the society as a whole. So you reject certain institutions, and over time you actually have a problem with democracy in itself.

And so these correlations are there. I think therefore, um, studying, uh, digital hate and antisemitism in particular helps you understand where, where your own society stands at the moment. And that's something that is very interesting. It's again, it's quite psychological. It's quite an interesting observation of, of the Zeitgeist.

Um, and it has

01:06:03.150 — 01:06:24.070 · Matthias Becker
major implications because in order to tackle it, you need to understand how it operates. It's like, you know, it's like a virologist in a laboratory. You have to understand how the virus operates, and then you can build your, uh, based on that, your your remedy. Um, that exactly is the case for ideologies.

If you just let it grow,

01:06:25.190 — 01:07:12.180 · Matthias Becker
uh, it will flourish and it will normalize. But if you understand how why, for instance, young people who in other contexts are very open minded, are moderate, are progressive, etc., and you are completely against racism, why they get seduced and hijacked by certain ideas when you see that in real time online, how it happens through what kind of, um, argumentative patterns, through what kind of analogies you can use that in your in your intervention, in your inoculation.

Because then you see why they are, um, why they are open to that. And this, of course, I think there, there are just no limitations in like dealing with these issues.

01:07:12.220 — 01:07:18.420 · Ben Chertoff
People are terrified of AI, the possibilities. You know, they're the AI doomers out there. Um.

01:07:20.500 — 01:07:32.260 · Ben Chertoff
And there's been a lot of talk about how, you know, Grok turned itself into, uh, Hitler loving, uh, whatever. Do you think with the right training, there's a way to

01:07:33.940 — 01:07:42.980 · Ben Chertoff
AI could actually come in and help really help us understand this to a point where maybe we can make some progress. Finally.

01:07:43.620 — 01:07:55.500 · Matthias Becker
Absolutely, absolutely. It's it's completely I understand, uh, the the the the fear and the uncertainty about AI and I completely,

01:07:57.060 — 01:10:14.130 · Matthias Becker
Uh, I can completely see these concerns. Absolutely. But at the same time, you know, this is not the first time when human beings talk about technology and the effect of technology in a, in a positive or in a negative way. It really depends on the intent, right? It really depends on what you want to do with that.

And of course, AI can be used and misused. Uh, for the, uh, normalization of anti-Semitism, just like any other hate ideology. And, um, and we could easily get to a point that, uh, you know, social media cannot be used anymore because there's just such an abundance of distorted, hateful, um, you know, materials and obviously deepfakes and so on.

This is all, you know, very like, consistently discussed also in public discourse. And of course, now, you know, a few years ago you needed to have a whole team in order to push a certain narrative and maybe to orchestrate, um, a public discourse in some way. It was extremely expensive, and it was extremely tedious to to get to something.

And now you just need one person with the right skill set, with the right models. And, um, and you can come up with a whole, with a whole system of, of, um, like a whole waves of propaganda about, like, what Jews would represent. Right. And there are a range of studies that came out just in the last months about the 49 “rabbis,” etc..

I mean, this was pretty much in the media, and then people understood that this is all kind of fake, right? But it looked so authentic. And people who just scroll through the web and who have kind of a divided attention, they just consume it to some extent unconsciously, and it becomes part of their worldview.

So this is all real, right? This is a huge problem. And again, talking about deepfakes that are sometimes so sophisticated, um, that even experts struggle, um, identifying the, the, the these, um, the distorted dimension of it and and that this cannot be reality. Um, this is all well known, but at the same time,

01:10:15.450 — 01:10:27.170 · Matthias Becker
there's just no way around around it, right? There's no way that we can understand, but we can make sense of current society discourse without the help of AI because, um,

01:10:28.250 — 01:10:28.610 · Matthias Becker
uh,

01:10:30.010 — 01:11:25.040 · Matthias Becker
meaning is being produced in multiple ways and in a million different ways. And you, you you can't rely on the standard, the conventional qualitative methods or the conventional quantitative assessments, because then you actually create a lot of biases in talking about anti-Semitism. Um, as I mentioned Before.

Uh, just statistical analysis won't help you because there's just, um, the sheer amount of indirect speech is just overwhelming. So you need to have models that are able to understand to pick up this kind of noise, this kind of, um, ambient anti-Semitism in, in these online communities. And for that, you need to have models that are able to do distinguish between these different patterns who have enough world knowledge to, uh, to come to a well-informed decision.

So.

01:11:27.640 — 01:12:36.520 · Matthias Becker
That the, the, the, the I wouldn't see any opportunity, any way of, of shedding light on these current developments without using sophisticated tools that AI, uh, produces. Right. And, and so we can only use the same, I guess it would lead us, it would push us in this direction that we actually need to use the same tools that are very often misused by opponents in order to understand what is driving.

Um, society discourse and the future of democracy and so on. Um, because it is the the clear separation between qualitative, in-depth analysis and quantitative, usually rather superficial understanding of contemporary discourse. The bridge between them is AI, right? So in depth and representativeness can only come together if we have tools that are able to to understand these like this huge diversity and complexity of of human communication.

01:12:37.560 — 01:12:44.040 · Ben Chertoff
If people want to learn more about your work, learn more about all of this, where can they?

01:12:45.320 — 01:13:47.870 · Matthias Becker
So we have um, there's of course, the Decoding Antisemitism website that also shows a range of applications. You can also find the Decoding Antisemitism lexicon, uh, on that website. We are now here at NYU developing, uh, a new website for the new project called Decoding Hate, where we're looking where we will be looking at anti-Semitism, but also into anti-Asian and anti-Black racism and misogyny, which is just the start.

We will open it up towards other hate ideologies as well. So this website is, um, in preparation and will be launched hopefully in two months from now. And apart from that, we have a Substack channel, uh, called Decoding Antisemitism. And uh, are very, very happy to to get in touch with interested, um, cooperation partners who work in education, in law, in, uh, in the political arena in order to share more of our insights.

01:13:48.630 — 01:13:51.590 · Ben Chertoff
Outstanding. Matthias Becker, thank you so much for joining me.

01:13:51.950 — 01:13:52.870 · Matthias Becker
Thank you so much.

01:13:58.990 — 01:15:38.500 · Ben Chertoff
Here's what stayed with me. Anti-Semitism, he said, is never really about the Jews. It's about the anti-Semites. It's a magnifying glass. You hold up to society, and what you see through it is the society itself, its fears, its resentments, who it blames when things go wrong. And that's why he reads the comment section closely.

It tells you where a country's actually headed, and the part I didn't expect after ten years staring into the worst of it. He isn't a cynic. He's hopeful because the same technology that lets one person manufacture a wave of propaganda is also the first tool we've had. Powerful enough to read the flood back to see the coded hate at scale.

The virus and the antidote come from the same lab. Which one wins is a choice. You can find Matthias's work at the Decoding Antisemitism project and on his Substack, Decoding Antisemitism. His team's lexicon — the field guide to all of this — has been downloaded more than 350,000 times, and it's free. Links are in the description.

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I'm Ben Chertoff. This is The Honest Take, and we'll see you next time.