Instagram pushes mainstream wellness users toward antisemitic content, watchdog says

An investigation by the Antisemitism Research Center of the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) reveals that Instagram's recommendation algorithm can easily steer users interested in mainstream self-improvement toward virulent antisemitic material and Nazi propaganda. The watchdog group published its findings on Wednesday.

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Despite different starting points, both accounts were independently routed toward the same antisemitic narrative clusters, tropes, scapegoating logic, and, in several cases, the same specific pieces of content.

To conduct the study, CAM utilized two neutral persona accounts that followed mainstream creators in the fitness and wellness sectors. Researchers engaged in three 45-minute online sessions daily, strictly observing the feeds without interacting by liking, sharing, or commenting to avoid influencing the algorithm. The report indicated that without any active user intent, both accounts were rapidly served content promoting conspiracy theories and explicit hate speech.

By the third day of the observation period, a striking 31 percent of the wellness account's content and 18 percent of the fitness account's content consisted of explicit antisemitism, according to CAM. Across the three days, 32% of wellness videos and 24% of fitness videos contained coded or explicit antisemitism. The report noted that despite different starting points, both accounts were independently routed toward similar antisemitic narrative clusters, scapegoating logic, and specific pieces of content, suggesting a systemic issue within the platform's algorithms.

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This suggests the issue is not only a community-level phenomenon but a deeper failure in the algorithmic architecture.

CAM acknowledged that the report is an exploratory, hypothesis-generating piece of research with methodological limitations, including a small sample size. Meta, Instagram's parent company, did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication. The researchers selected topics like wellness and fitness due to their overlap with anti-establishment or conspiratorial narratives, such as distrust of pharmaceutical companies or "hidden truth" framing around health. Similarly, fitness content often intersects with "escape the matrix" themes and "manosphere" messaging concerning societal decline. The study identified a clear five-tier "escalation framework" that guides users from mainstream content toward extremist narratives.

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These themes can make … content vulnerable to algorithmic coupling with more extremist conspiratorial narratives.