Online Anti-Israel Hate Gets an AI Opponent

Despite initial support for Israel and largely universal condemnation of the Hamas attacks on October 7, the number of anti-Semitic incidents, campus protests, and online vitriol against Israel and Jews has skyrocketed.  

For many, social media has become a battlefield. 

Enter Zachary Bamberger, an American who immigrated to Israel. The Cornell graduate is currently working toward his master’s in the Technion’s Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science. 

When he saw what was happening online, he sprang into action. Using his prodigious talents in machine learning and natural language processing research, he built a large language model (LLM) that fights the onslaught of anti-Israel content and promotes positive posts to a global audience. 

Over the last month, he has enlisted the help of students, professors, Technion alumni, and other volunteers to reinvent methods for combatting hate speech online.  

“It can be really challenging for the average person to know where to start with taking meaningful action on social media, and we want to give people the tools to strengthen their voices and fight back against hateful posts online,” said Bamberger.  

Bamberger’s company, Rhetoric AI (opens in a new tab), instantly generates high-quality translations of Arabic and Hebrew posts. The model predicts the virality of posts, reports posts that violate TOS (terms of service) agreements, and produces counterarguments in Arabic, Hebrew, or English for volunteers to use in their own responses.  

“When deployed on a larger scale, our platform will shift the balance of content and take away the numbers advantage of those who propagate hate, violence, and lies,” Bamberger said. 

Rhetoric AI is already collaborating with some of the best-known experts in the field, including AI21 Labs, Google, and Microsoft.