Explosive new investigation shows household brands are profiting from racist entries and offensive jokes on the website Urban Dictionary

An explosive investigation has revealed that household brands are profiting from racist entries and offensive jokes on the website Urban Dictionary.

In new research seen by Campaign Against Antisemitism and conducted by Dr Daniel Allington, who is Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural Artificial Intelligence at King’s College London and a volunteer with Campaign Against Antisemitism, Dr Allington shows that many entries in Urban Dictionary appear to have been written by white supremacists and other bigots and that well-known brands are profiting from their racism.

Dr Allington, an expert on hate speech and extremism, has published the research in the peer-reviewed Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, explains that Urban Dictionary, a website that explains Internet slang and which has been embroiled in controversy over antisemitism in the past, carries adverts for household brands such as DFS and Sky, but that it is also a hotbed of antisemitism.

One Urban Dictionary entry defines the word ‘Jew’ as a verb meaning “To steal something from someone and never return it”, while another on the same page defines a Jew as “A cheap ass n*****”. The top definition for ‘Zionist’ is “One who believes in a political ideology that hijacked Judaism, soon to hijack Christianity’, while the fifth-from-top is “A pig in the temple of God” and the third-from top states “I hate Zionist kikes”.

Some entries try to equate Jews with Nazism or to suggest that the Holocaust did not happen. One of the top definitions of ‘Zionazi’, itself an antisemitic term, claims that “A Zionazi is defined by their will to create and support a single government or group that rules the world, such as the totalitarian New World Order”. The top entry for ‘Holohoax’ claims that “people who ‘deny’ the Holocaust seem to provide more proof and evidence supporting the fact the Holocaust never happened”.

The fourth definition for ‘Hitler’ is “Someone who got 6 000 000 kills in a single match”, while some words in the Urban Dictionary seem to have been entered purely in order to cause offence, such as ‘holocaust n*****’ (defined simply as “a Jew”) and ‘nigropolis’ (defined as “The world after whites are all killed and racemixed by Zionist Jews and n*****s”).

Dr Allington said: “I realised that hardcore racists were exploiting Urban Dictionary’s ‘anything goes’ philosophy to promote their extremist views. It wouldn’t matter so much if it were an obscure website that nobody had heard of, but Urban Dictionary is one of the most popular websites in the world and it carries adverts for household name brands.”

Campaign Against Antisemitism is writing to advertisers on Urban Dictionary to alert them to the content on the website next to which their brands appear and urging them to withdraw from the website.