A generation is learning about one of the world's most contested conflicts almost entirely through YouTube and social media — developing a completely different vocabulary than the one journalism uses to cover the same conflict. The emotional narrative students encounter online is being shaped primarily by outside political and media voices delivered through algorithms, not peer-to-peer conversation.
Read the Full Report ↓Since October 7, 2023, U.S. campuses have seen a sharp rise in reports of antisemitism and in student protests about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. University administrators have largely been relying on incident reports, staff observations, and traditional news coverage to understand what is happening — while students are experiencing the same events through social media feeds, search results, and content pushed to them by algorithms. This report maps that gap using three independent datasets and examines how three different AI systems analyzed the same information.
Students and the people who run universities are often working from completely different definitions of the same words. Terms like "antisemitism," "anti-Zionism," "decolonization," "apartheid," and "Free Palestine" mean different things depending on where someone learned them and which sources they trust. These are not just differences of opinion — they reflect genuinely different information environments, and they make it very difficult for institutions and students to communicate clearly with each other.
This report draws on three sources of data. Google Trends — a free tool that tracks what people search online — was used to measure five years of search activity on YouTube, the general web, and news sites (2021–2026). Brand24 — a social media tracking tool — monitored posts about these topics across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube in North America over 30 days (March 15–April 13, 2026), capturing 562 posts that reached a combined 6.6 million people. Comscore — an audience measurement service — provided data on which news sources college-age students actually visit and how much they engage with different types of content.
Four tabs below reflect the four data sources we analyzed. Click each tab to explore what the data showed. Each section includes a plain-English explanation of what the findings mean for campus leadership.
Google Trends tracks how often people search for specific words or phrases. We tracked five terms — Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, Decolonization, Apartheid, and Free Palestine — across three different search surfaces over five years. What we found is that young people searching on YouTube and the general web are encountering a completely different vocabulary than the one used in news coverage and institutional communications.
The data doesn't show that young people are less informed about this conflict. It shows they are informed through a completely different vocabulary, built on different platforms, that mainstream journalism has largely not adopted — and that campus policies were not written to address.
For a political term to shape public understanding, it has to pass through three stages. First students discover it — usually through a video or creator. Then they look it up to understand what it means. Then journalists start reporting on it and it becomes part of the official conversation. Most terms in this dataset never make it to stage three — and one never even made it to stage one.
Brand24 is a tool that tracks posts, comments, and videos that mention specific words or phrases across social media platforms. We used it to monitor content about antisemitism and anti-Zionism across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube in North America over 30 days. The central finding: the emotional tone of what students see online is being set primarily by outside political commentators and media personalities — not by peers or campus institutions.
Times this topic was posted about across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram in 30 days — reaching 6.6 million people
Increase in likes, comments, and shares on anti-Zionism posts compared to the month before — the conversation exploded almost overnight
Of posts carried a hostile or negative tone in the second half of the window — and that share kept rising even as total posts declined
This shows where students are seeing content about these topics. The fact that nearly three-quarters of all posts came from TikTok matters because TikTok is built around short videos served by an algorithm — meaning students aren't seeking this content out, they're being served it. Campus email blasts and press releases don't reach this space at all.
This tracks whether posts about these topics were angry and hostile, supportive, or neutral in tone. The key finding is not just that negativity is high — it's that even as fewer people were posting in the second half of the window, the posts that remained were more negative. The loudest voices in a shrinking conversation tend to be the most extreme ones.
Hashtags are the labels people attach to posts so others can find them. This list reveals what conversation the posts were being plugged into. The dominance of #antisemitism tells us this topic is being discussed primarily as a hate and discrimination issue. But the presence of #zionism, #zionist, and #israel alongside it shows that posts about antisemitism and posts about Israeli politics are flowing through the same online spaces — often in the same breath.
#antisemitism appears nearly 4× more than any other tag
* From anti-Zionism dataset (separate Brand24 query). Bar chart figures from Brand24 Summary PDF.
These are the accounts whose posts were seen by the most people. None of them are college students, campus organizations, or university administrators. They are national media outlets and political commentators — and crucially, each one only posted once. Their reach came entirely from the size of their existing follower base, amplified by the algorithm. This is who is setting the emotional tone of the conversation students are walking into.
Each posted only once — reach driven by follower size, not volume
Important context before reading these numbers: antisemitism and anti-Zionism were tracked as two completely separate searches — like running two different Google searches and recording the results independently. They are not two parts of the same search. That distinction matters because comparing them directly — without noting they come from different searches — would give a misleading picture of which topic is bigger or more negative.
While antisemitism total volume is larger, anti-Zionism is growing explosively (+2,483%) while antisemitism is declining (–31%). Antisemitism conversation is news-dominated; anti-Zionism conversation is TikTok/YouTube-only. These two ecosystems have almost no platform overlap.
The emotional narrative around antisemitism and anti-Zionism that college students encounter online is being shaped primarily by outside political and media voices delivered through algorithms — not through peer-to-peer conversation.
— Brand24 Summary Finding · March 15–April 13, 2026 · 562 Mentions · 6.6M ReachComscore measures which websites and apps people actually visit and how much they engage with different types of content. We used it to understand two things: which news sources college-age students actually read, and which types of social media posts about this topic get the most likes, shares, and comments. The results reveal a clear gap between who has formal authority over campus life and who actually holds influence over what students see and believe.
University or campus organization accounts in the top 20 highest-performing posts — which together generated nearly 8 million total actions
More engagement on geopolitical/political content (16.7M actions) than on campus-specific protest content (under 900K actions)
Of the adult audience consuming this content are not college students — most are Millennial professionals and Gen X adults treating this as a national political debate
One of the most counterintuitive findings: college-age students make up only 2.9% of the total adult digital audience engaging with this content — about 7 million people out of 244 million. Millennial professionals (87.7 million) and Gen X high-income households (83.6 million) dwarf that number. The people most actively consuming content about campus antisemitism are overwhelmingly not students. They are adults engaging with it as a national political and cultural debate. Even within the student segment, exposure is happening almost entirely through large national outlets — not campus sources.
When we categorized all posts by theme, the results were stark. Political commentary and content about the broader war dominated completely — 286 posts generating 16.7 million actions, which is 57% of everything measured. Campus protest content, which is the most directly relevant to university leadership, accounted for only 23 posts and under 900,000 actions. The content winning online is not rooted in what happened at a specific university. It is rooted in geopolitical conflict, identity-based political debate, and globally recognizable names.
None of these are universities, student organizations, or campus media. MLB on FOX appearing in this list is itself a sign of how scattered and algorithmically random the content ecosystem is.
Campus protest content — the category most directly relevant to university policy — generated 19× less engagement than geopolitical commentary.
The numbers below show how many people liked, commented on, or shared each type of post. This reveals a stark imbalance: content that frames this conflict as a political and human rights issue gets dramatically more engagement than content that frames it as a hate crime issue — and that gap shapes what students see when they open their feeds.
Anti-Zionist social content (~782,000 actions per post) generates approximately 60× more engagement than antisemitism-awareness news content (~12,900 actions per post). Even anti-Zionist news coverage outperforms antisemitism-awareness content by nearly 9×. The algorithmic reality is clear: students scrolling social media are far more likely to encounter content framing this conflict as a human rights and political issue than as a hate crime issue — regardless of what campus leadership communicates through traditional channels.
Universities, administrators, and official campus organizations have authority — they make policy, issue statements, and have direct responsibility for campus life. But they have almost no influence in the way this data measures it. The accounts generating millions of actions are celebrities, international media outlets, and politically engaged public figures who have no formal role in campus governance whatsoever. The conversation students are most exposed to is not the one their institutions are trying to lead. By the time campus framing reaches students online, it has already been filtered through global geopolitical narratives, entertainment culture, and viral political commentary — and campus voices are nowhere near the top of what the algorithm surfaces.
Many students use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to look things up — including definitions of politically contested terms. To test how reliable these tools are on this topic, we gave all three systems the exact same questions about our research data and compared their answers side by side. The goal was simple: does the answer a student gets depend on which AI they happen to open? In several cases, it does.
| What we asked | Claude | ChatGPT | Gemini |
|---|---|---|---|
| "What were the main things this social media data showed about anti-Zionism online?" | Most AccurateGot the platform numbers exactly right — TikTok had 169 posts, YouTube 138, Instagram only 3. Gave the most detailed and precise summary of all three systems. | Got it WrongIncorrectly said Instagram was one of the top two platforms — it was actually a distant third with only 3 posts. Also misread one of the scoring metrics. | Mostly RightGot the growth trend right but accidentally mixed in numbers from the antisemitism search instead of sticking to the anti-Zionism search. Didn't flag the error. |
| "Does this data show that students treat antisemitism and anti-Zionism as the same thing?" | Most CarefulCorrectly pointed out that just because these words appear together in posts doesn't mean people are treating them as identical — that's an assumption, not a fact the data can prove. This is the most honest reading of the evidence. | Jumped to ConclusionsStated as fact that students conflate the two terms — but the data only shows the words appear together, not that people think they mean the same thing. This overstates what the data can tell us. | Jumped to ConclusionsMade the same leap as ChatGPT — treated an observation about word patterns as proof of what students believe. The data doesn't support that conclusion on its own. |
| "What single number or finding stood out most in this data?" | Found the Best InsightWas the only system to flag that April 14 had an enormous single-day spike — about 60 posts in one day, which is 34 times the daily average. Also named the specific accounts driving that spike. No other system caught this. | AccurateCorrectly highlighted the big headline numbers — mentions up 2,483%, reach up 3,351%, interactions up 13,155%. Solid summary but didn't dig deeper than the top-line stats. | AccurateFound a different but equally important detail — a 3,250% surge in posts about Jewish students on campus, and a 2,768% jump in how often those posts were shared. Neither of the other systems surfaced this. |
| "Who is actually reading and engaging with this content — what age groups and types of people?" | Most AccurateCorrectly explained that the audience data comes from two different measurement tools that track different things — and noted that the people following antisemitism coverage in news are mostly 25–54 year olds, not college students. | Too Vague to UseGave a generic answer without citing any actual numbers or audience data. Not useful for a research report — couldn't be quoted or cited. | Mostly RightGot the key numbers right — 30% of college-age students visit the New York Times, and the Oscars "Free Palestine" post got nearly a million interactions. Mixed up two different age groups in one part of the answer. |
| "What was the single most surprising finding in the Google search data?" | Found the Key FindingThe only system to catch this: more people searched "antisemitism" after Kanye West made controversial comments in 2022 than after the October 7 attack in 2023. A celebrity controversy drove more searches than a major geopolitical crisis. Neither other system made this connection. | AccurateCorrectly identified the main patterns — antisemitism peaked in 2022, anti-Zionism was nearly invisible until 2023, and "Free Palestine" surged around major events. Didn't spot the celebrity vs. crisis comparison. | AccurateCorrectly noted that "Apartheid" hit the highest search index of all five terms in October 2023, and that celebrity-related searches grew by over 2,500%. Added useful context about how search interest builds over time. |
| "Which platforms had the most posts about anti-Zionism?" | AccurateGave the correct ranking: TikTok first (169 posts), YouTube second (138), Instagram a distant third (only 3). Also correctly noted that LinkedIn figures belong to a completely different search about antisemitism, not anti-Zionism. | Factually WrongRanked Instagram as the second-biggest platform — which is incorrect. Instagram had only 3 posts in this dataset. The 83 Instagram posts it cited came from an entirely different search about Jewish students on campus. | Mixed Up the DataBrought in LinkedIn numbers that belong to the antisemitism search, not the anti-Zionism search. Presented them as if they were part of the same dataset, which they are not. |
Based on everything the data showed, we identified four concrete actions campus leadership can take. Each one is grounded in a specific finding from this research. They are written to be realistic — things a university can actually do — not just aspirational statements.
Right now, the conversation about antisemitism and anti-Zionism on campus is happening almost entirely on TikTok and YouTube — not in email inboxes, not on news websites, and not through official university channels. Nearly three quarters of all tracked posts about these topics appeared on TikTok alone. Email and press releases simply cannot compete with what students are already seeing in their feeds every day.
The university should create short, clear video content that speaks to students directly — on the platforms they actually use — and that explains contested terms like anti-Zionism and decolonization in plain, non-judgmental language. The goal of this content is comprehension, not public relations or reputation management. Success means students understand these terms better — not that the university looks good. Content should be developed with input from faculty who specialize in Jewish studies, Middle East studies, Islamic studies, and communication, and reviewed regularly to ensure it stays accurate and balanced.
Students are not using the same words that campus policies were written around. Terms like "decolonization," "apartheid," and "anti-Zionism" are widely used in student conversations — but are largely absent from university conduct codes, incident-response procedures, and staff training materials. When an incident happens, the staff responding to it need to understand the vocabulary involved to respond appropriately.
Any updated policy framework needs to hold two things at the same time: the safety and dignity of Jewish students, and the safety and dignity of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students. These are not competing concerns — they are simultaneous obligations. Our data shows students are actively searching for the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, meaning many are genuinely trying to understand the line, not cross it. Updated policies should reflect that reality rather than treating all contested language as inherently hostile.
Several of the most significant shifts in this report — sudden spikes in posting activity and entirely new terms emerging within weeks — unfolded quickly and with little visibility from an institutional perspective. A structured approach to observing publicly available discourse would allow leadership to identify these patterns early and prepare more informed, timely responses rather than reacting after the fact.
This project provides a working model. A periodic digital intelligence brief — summarizing which terms are gaining traction, how conversations are being framed, and which outside voices are most visible to 18–24 year olds nationally — would give leadership a clearer picture of how students are encountering and interpreting these issues. Importantly, this is not about watching what individual students post. It is about understanding the broader information environment that all college-age people are exposed to, regardless of which campus they attend. This effort should also include simple guidance for students and staff on how to approach AI-generated information, since definitions of contested terms vary significantly across different AI systems.
While much of this report focuses on the digital information environment, the most durable understanding of contested topics is built through direct human interaction. The data shows students are already searching for definitions, asking questions, and trying to understand the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism on their own. The campus can meet that curiosity with something no algorithm can provide: real conversation, shared space, and the chance to ask questions without it being permanent.
Existing programs — town halls, training sessions, restorative practices, and bias-response protocols — should be updated to directly engage the vocabulary students are actually using. That means facilitators who are comfortable discussing terms like "decolonization," "anti-Zionism," and "apartheid" in an educational rather than disciplinary context, and sessions designed to build understanding rather than correct behavior. Students who feel these conversations are being managed from above rather than facilitated alongside them will disengage. The goal is to make the campus a place where this vocabulary can be examined openly — not a place where it is avoided until something goes wrong.
Partner with student clubs related to Jewish life, Palestinian advocacy, Middle Eastern studies, and interfaith organizations to host tabling events with free food, giveaways, or activities. The one requirement to participate: follow an official campus page or verified educational account connected to the issue the club represents. This builds digital reach for campus-vetted voices at the same time as it builds in-person connection.
Hold regular, structured forums where students can ask questions about campus policy, contested vocabulary, and current events — with faculty and administrators present not to lecture, but to listen and respond. Format matters: small roundtables are more effective than auditorium-style presentations for conversations this charged. Anonymous question submission reduces the social risk of asking something that feels sensitive.
Invest in trained facilitators who can run structured dialogue sessions across different student communities — Jewish students, Muslim students, Arab students, and students with no personal connection to the conflict who are simply trying to understand it. The Google Trends data shows these groups are all searching for the same definitions. Giving them a shared space to explore those definitions together is something the algorithm cannot replicate.
Update existing bias-response protocols to reflect the vocabulary students are using — not just the vocabulary administrators are familiar with. When a student reports an incident using the word "Zionist" or "decolonization," the person receiving that report needs to understand what those terms mean in context. Restorative practices work best when both parties feel the institution understands what is actually being said.
Here is the central finding of this report, stated as plainly as possible: students and campus leadership are not just disagreeing about events — they are often working from entirely different sources of information. They encounter this topic through different platforms, in different language, and through different voices. This is not just an impression — it shows up consistently across every dataset we looked at.
Consider how political vocabulary travels across these environments. Words like "apartheid" have been used by major human rights organizations and debated in international legal proceedings — but students don't primarily encounter political vocabulary through reports or official statements. They encounter it through videos, creators, and feeds that are curated by algorithms, which shapes both when those terms appear and how they are understood.
At the same time, terms like "anti-Zionism" have spread rapidly through social media and search, carried by influencers, commentators, and media personalities. These platforms don't just spread the word — they shape what it means to the people who see it, often in ways that differ significantly from how the same term is defined in an academic paper or a university policy document. Students end up learning a version of this vocabulary that may not match what campus communications assume they know.
Students are not disengaged from this issue. They are often deeply engaged — but through sources, words, and interpretive frameworks that most campus policies and communications were not designed to address. This gap is further widened by the fact that younger people increasingly distrust traditional media, and many feel that the perspectives most relevant to them are not represented in official institutional language.
The four recommendations in this report — meeting students on the platforms they actually use, updating policies and programs to reflect the language students actually encounter, building a simple system to track the information environment students are exposed to, and creating in-person spaces for open conversation — are designed to help institutions close this gap before it becomes a crisis.
The question is not whether to understand the information shaping student perspectives, but whether to do so proactively or reactively.
All sources used in this report, including the research data, academic studies, and institutional reports that informed our findings and recommendations.