An Instagram account with almost 400,000 followers is promoting racist and antisemitic t-shirts, another sign that Meta is unable or unwilling to enforce its own policies against hate speech. 404 Media flagged the account to Meta as well as specific racist posts that violate its hate speech policies, but Meta didn’t remove the account and the vast majority of its racist posts.
The account posts a variety of memes that cover a wide range of topics, many of which are not hate speech and would not violate Meta’s policies, like the pizzagate conspiracy, 9/11, Jeffery Epstein, and criticism of Israel and mainstream news outlets like CNN and Fox News. If a user were to pick a post at random they might not even immediately identify the account as right-wing or extremist. For example, some memes posted by the account and shirts sold by the brand it promotes include messages criticizing Israel, the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, and general distrust of the government.
Other memes and shirts promoted by the account might confuse the average internet user, but people who are fluent in extremist online culture will clearly recognize them as antisemitic. For example, seemingly one of the more popular designs promoted by the channel is of a simple line drawing of hands clasping and the text “Early life.” On the store page for this design, which comes on t-shirts for $27.99, mugs for $15, and hoodies for $49.99, the description says: “A totally normal design encouraging you to wash your hands — definitely just about hygiene. Nothing symbolic here. Just good, clean habits… taught very early in life.”
“Early life” refers to a common section of biographical Wikipedia articles that would state whether the person is Jewish. As Know Your Meme explains, this is a “dog-whistle meme” often used to spread antisemitic sentiments. The clasping hands are of the antisemitic drawing of the “happy merchant.”
Another cryptic design promoted by the Instagram account is of a juice box with the text “notice the juice” and several seemingly random figures like “109% juice” and “available in 271,000 stores.” These are also dog-whistles that other people who are swimming in hate speech would instantly understand. 109 refers to the claim that Jews have been expelled from that many countries, and 271,000 refers to the number Holocaust deniers often say is the “real” number of people who died in Nazi concentration camps. Another piece of text on the juice box is “6,000,000 artificial ingredients.”
Years of reporting on niche internet communities sadly means that I’m familiar with all of these symbols and figures, but many of this account’s posts on Instagram are far less subtle and require no special knowledge to understand it’s hateful. A post on August 27, for example, shows a meme of actor William Dafoe holding the diary of Anne Frank with a subtitle saying “you know, I’m something of a fiction critic myself.” Another design promoted on Instagram shows a man wearing a shirt with the text “don’t be a” and a picture of a bundle of sticks, also known in Middle English as a “fagot.”
Instagram’s Community Standards on “hateful conduct” tells users to not post “Harmful stereotypes [...] holocaust denial,” or “Content that describes or negatively targets people with slurs.”
Last year, Meta concluded an embarrassing and agonizing charade about its Holocaust denial policy. An Instagram user posted a Squidward-themed Holocaust denial meme. “Upon initial review, Meta left this content up,” the company said. Users kept flagging the post as hate speech and Facebook moderators kept assessing it as not violating Instagram policies. Users appealed this decision, which was picked up by Meta’s Oversight Board, a kind of “supreme court” for Meta’s moderation decisions. Upon further review, it determined the post did in fact violate its hate speech policy. The entire ordeal for removing the antisemitic Squidward meme took four years.
It’s an insane process but I’m belaboring the point because while some of these shirts and posts might not quite cross the line, even Meta’s top sham court has made it extremely clear that this account violates its policies. Instagram just doesn’t take action against it even after hundreds of posts and amassing a following of 400,000 people. It’s also just one account I decided to cover today because it appeared to have monetized this content effectively, but Instagram served it to me as one of many racist posts I see daily.
I sent Instagram the account promoting these shirts as well as several specific posts. Instagram only removed a couple of those specific posts, like the one calling Anne Frank’s book fiction. Instagram did not remove a post promoting the “early life” shirt. It also didn’t remove a shirt with an image of Michael Jackson and the text “(((They))) don’t really care about us.” Putting triple parentheses around “they” is an antisemitic symbol used to refer to Jews. “The media, Hollywood, the machine – they made hima a joke, a monster a meme. All because he spoke out about the ones you’re not allowed to name,” the text accompanying the post said.
The t-shirt problem here is not unique to Instagram. On August 26 The Verge wrote a good piece about a different antisemitic shirt that was sold in a TikTok Shop, Amazon, and other online marketplaces. The piece correctly points out that the rise of print-on-demand and drop-shipping has created incentives for people, many of whom don’t live in the U.S. and are not invested in any political outcomes here, to sell any image or text that is popular. This is why we see a lot of tiny ecommerce shops pivot from “#1 Grandpa” shirt one day to MAGA hats the next. They just sell whatever appears to be trending and often lift images from other sites without permission.
The Instagram account promoting the juice box shirt is a little more involved than that. For one, as far as I can tell the designs are unique and originate on that account and the online store it promotes. Second, whoever is making these designs is clearly fluent in the type of hate speech they are monetizing. Finally, as The Verge article points out, these print-on-demand shirts are easy to set up so it’s not always clear if the shirts or hats these stores are offering are ever really produced. That is not the case with the company behind the juice box shirt, which shares pictures of customers who bought its stuff and tags them on Instagram.
There are a few other juice box designs on the site, but the one I described above was removed sometime between May and August, before I reached out for comment. However, the design has since been swallowed up by this print-on-demand ecommerce machine, and is now available to buy from various sellers on Walmart, Amazon, and dozens of other online stores.
I kept track of this Instagram account and store because it was particularly disgusting and because it found a way to monetize hate speech on Instagram. I decided to write about it today because The Verge story reminded me that while this practice is common, it’s very, very bad. But the reality is that this is just one of countless such accounts on Instagram. Unless Meta changes its enforcement methods I could write one of these every day until I die. That wouldn’t be much of a life for me and not very interesting for you. We have become desensitized to the blatant dehumanization of entire groups online precisely because Instagram is putting it in front of our faces all the time. Occasionally, something snaps me out of this delirium and for a moment I can clearly see how bad this flood of hate speech is for all of us before I drown in it again.
