Success for CAA as Urban Dictionary removes horrendous “Holocaust n*****” entry following our campaign urging brands to pull their adverts from the controversial website
Urban Dictionary has removed a page devoted to the antisemitic term “Holocaust n*****” following contact between Campaign Against Antisemitism and numerous advertisers on the controversial website, several of which have now pulled their marketing from the website altogether.
After 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, showed 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, Campaign Against Antisemitism alerted several household brands, a number of which immediately thanked us for contacting them and took immediate remedial action to protect their reputations. The brands include DFS, People’s Postcode Lottery and Canterbury Christ Church University, all of which were relying on third parties to place advertisements for them online.
As a result of their actions, the “Holocaust n*****” page on the website has been taken down. The definition provided for the offensive term was simply: “a Jew”.
Dr Allington’s research showed other offensive and antisemitic entries on Urban Dictionary. One 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, including ‘holocaust n*****’ 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.”
Stephen Silverman, Director of Investigations and Enforcement at Campaign Against Antisemitism, said: “We are pleased that, building on the work of Dr Daniel Allington, our campaign to alert companies to how their brands are being advertised has also brought pressure to bear on Urban Dictionary, which is replete with antisemitic, racist and needlessly offensive entries. We intend to maintain this pressure in the hope that the people behind Urban Dictionary will do the decent thing and clean up their website once and for all.”
