How toxic is antisemitism? Potentials and limitations of automated
  toxicity scoring for antisemitic online content
Helena Mihaljević Elisabeth Steffen
The Perspective API, a popular text toxicity assessment service by Google and
Jigsaw, has found wide adoption in several application areas, notably content
moderation, monitoring, and social media research. We examine its potentials
and limitations for the detection of antisemitic online content that, by
definition, falls under the toxicity umbrella term. Using a manually annotated
German-language dataset comprising around 3,600 posts from Telegram and
Twitter, we explore as how toxic antisemitic texts are rated and how the
toxicity scores differ regarding different subforms of antisemitism and the
stance expressed in the texts. We show that, on a basic level, Perspective API
recognizes antisemitic content as toxic, but shows critical weaknesses with
respect to non-explicit forms of antisemitism and texts taking a critical
stance towards it. Furthermore, using simple text manipulations, we demonstrate
that the use of widespread antisemitic codes can substantially reduce API
scores, making it rather easy to bypass content moderation based on the
service's results.