FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — For the past five years, a specialty “command center” that researches anti-Semitism has been operating inside the New England Patriots’ home stadium in this Boston suburb — and tracked a rise in Hitler glorification since last February.
Wall-sized screens, refreshed every minute, show live updates on public conversation topics related to anti-Semitism.
Tweets featuring anti-Semitic dog whistles are also blasted onto an enormous dashboard — hand-me-down technology formerly used by the Patriots during team practice to run plays.
The command center is where the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate monitors more than one billion social media posts every day.
It’s a project of the Patriots’ Jewish owner Robert Kraft, the Boston-area philanthropist who founded the alliance in 2019.
The anti-hate organization announced the formation of a new advisory board of high-profile names:
• former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice;
• Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav;
• Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan;
• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff;
• Dentons CEO Kate Barton.
The advisory board will guide the organization on strategy and “deepen institutional relationships,” its website said.
The statement said the board will help further the mission of the roughly dozen analysts who staff the command center.
They monitor trends in antiSemitic rhetoric online, craft research reports based on their findings, and use search engine optimization to make links with their resources float to the top of Google search results.
The wall-sized screens are filled with word clouds, pie charts, bar graphs, tweets and Facebook posts, detailing what everyday Americans encounter online.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, the Blue Square Alliance has been on particularly high alert, monitoring shifts in the online conversation around anti-Semitism, which often included ordinary social media users swapping the word “Zionist” for “Jew” in derogatory ways.
In late February, when the US and Israel entered the war with Iran, the Blue Square Alliance began noticing new trends in their data.
“What we saw, especially right after the operation began, is Hitler glorification was the first thing to spike,” Rotem Leiba, a lead analyst at Blue Square Alliance said.
“In terms of all the anti-Semitic things we’ve seen happening at this time, Hitler glorification was the first to spike.”
Using Brandwatch, the social media monitoring software, the team found that terms like “Hitler was right,” “We owe Hitler an apology,” and “Hitler knew what he was doing” appeared with increasing frequency — more than it did in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
A new term, “Hitler in heaven,” also began popping up across social media, topping similar sentiments at 21.4 million impressions.
One area they are still investigating is bots: Automated software programs frequently amplify levels of hate speech.
“We are starting to talk to other partners that can help us understand who are the actors behind these conversations and . . . their echo chambers, and who’s the one publishing it,” Leiba said.
Efforts to manipulate public opinion and inflame social tensions are often pinned on Russia, Iran and other countries, although most of those bots Blue Square is tracking appear to be homegrown, Leiba said.
As Israel and the US joined forces to attack Iran, and Israel responded to Hezbollah attack from Lebanon, rhetoric dehumanizing Jews also spiked.
CyberWell, a compliance partner to social media organizations that helps them follow content moderation and regulatory policies, also found similar results.
Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, founder and executive director of CyberWell, said the users would compare Jews to “rats, pigs, monkeys or cockroaches in the comments section — that’s human beings being really disgusting.”
The alliance is part of a field of anti-Semitism watchdogs that includes Cyberwell, the Combat Antisemitism Movement, the Secure Community Network and the ADL’s Center for Antisemitism Research.
The ADL and Blue Square Alliance announced the formation of a partnership in February to expand educational programming on anti-Semitism prevention in schools and providing support for synagogues and faith communities.
Their efforts are based on the idea that monitoring can help identify rising risks of violence and detect dangerous trends before they escalate.
Susan Benesch, who directs the Dangerous Speech Project at Harvard University, has written that such early warning systems are helpful, but only so long as they are matched by actions.
She suggests “counterspeech” by influential members of a community and strengthening social norms in the communities from which the hate speech and misinformation emerges.
When internet users look up an anti-Semitic theory or a trending dog whistle, Blue Square wants its results to be the first they see.
Steven Fransblow, chief data and technology officer at the Blue Square Alliance, provided a typical example. “We’re trying to crack the code on: how can we continue to be surfaced when Candace Owens says, ‘go research this. They’re finding us, versus Reddit.”
Example:
Candace Owens, who promotes anti-Semitism, has nearly eight million followers on Twitter, and nearly six million subscribers on YouTube. She suggested that her former employer, the conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, who is Jewish, sought to grab the mantle of Turning Point USA’s slain founder Charlie Kirk, saying Shapiro was acting as if he was promised the role “3,000 years ago.”
That’s a code word.
The “3,000 years ago” phrase is an anti-Semitic meme, mocking Jews for claiming ancestral ties to the Land of Israel. That phrase, which Blue Square says arose as early as 2014 but took off after Oct. 7, is one that the organization is working to counteract with its web presence.
Search “3,000 years ago” and “Jews” in Google and hits explaining its anti-Semitic intent pop up from the American Jewish Committee, CyberWell, the Times of Israel and social media sites like Reddit and Quora.
Last week, Blue Square’s explanation of the term showed up on the second page of search results.
A $15 million Super Bowl ad, which aired in February, featured a Jewish high school student who discovers a Post-It note scrawled with the words “Dirty Jew.” Critics said the word choice wasoutdated or unrealistic, or called the ad spending outlandish.
Blue Square’s Adam Katz defended the ad, saying it was a vindication of the “command center” and its data-driven approach to monitoring anti-Semitic language and memes.
“We were looking at what are the most ubiquitous slurs on social media that are happening with high volume and frequency and are understandable by everybody,” Katz said. “And that’s why we went with ‘dirty Jew.’”
He said the phrase “dirty Jew” made nearly 500 million impressions across 140,000 posts on X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Reddit, Bluesky, and 4Chan between 2023 and 2025 — an increase of 174% from the previous three years.
“With the Super Bowl, you have 30 seconds,” Katz said. “It’s got to hit and land with as close to 140 million people as possible. So you’re trying to find language that is recognizable, that is ubiquitous, that is common, that is inarguably anti-Semitic. We can’t afford to be too subtle.”