Not all social media trends start with harmful intent, but some are taken advantage of by bad actors to spread hate. A study by artists Ana Zibelnik and Jakob Ganslmeier explored how extremist messaging hides in everyday visuals. They found that even something as innocent looking as milk (🥛) or kiwi (🥝) emojis could carry coded messages tied to white supremacy or transphobia.
Expanding on this, the FCAS Command Center analyzed a year’s worth of data to track how emojis are being weaponized on social media to spread extremist ideologies. This shift from casual content to coded hate often slips under the radar, largely because of how emojis and symbols act as stand-ins for explicitly hateful language. They allow users to communicate antisemitic ideas while avoiding moderation tools that look for specific words or phrases.
How Historical Symbols Are Reframed Online
One striking example is the red triangle (🔻), historically used by Nazis to identify political prisoners. While a small number of users share it in the context of Holocaust remembrance or stories of resistance—such as the account of Witold Pilecki, who voluntarily entered Auschwitz to organize resistance and report Nazi crimes—most of the current online use reflects its adoption as a symbol in the pro-Palestine community.
The emoji has appeared in videos and was used 840,000 times this past year in social media posts, often referencing attacks or military actions alongside slogans such as “Palestine will be free” or “Do you support them?”
The juice box emoji (🧃) is a code word for the word “Jew.” In antisemitic posts, it’s used to spread conspiracy theories about Jewish people, all while slipping under the radar of content moderation. A recent example, highlighted in ADL’s Extremely newsletter, is a TikTok trend in which users describe themselves using stereotypes or exaggerated traits. While the format began as humor, it has been hijacked by antisemitic and white supremacist creators with posts such as “yes I am a • and yes, I control your government” or “yes, I run your ethnic autonomy.” On X, we also see comments such as “🧃 control the hip-hop industry” or references to the Armenian Holocaust allegedly “performed by 🧃.”
The lizard emoji (🦎) is commonly used in posts promoting conspiracy theories that claim Jewish control of global systems. These often refer to a so-called “New World Order” or label people as “Jewish puppets,” embedding these narratives within layers of coded emojis such as 🦎 and 🔻. This usage builds on an old trope with disturbing links to 19th-century antisemitic and anti-immigrant conspiracies about lizard people secretly controlling the world.
Even seemingly unrelated emojis like 🙋 have been hijacked. In some circles, they’re used to mimic or reference Nazi salutes, often sarcastically or in posts like “Elon’s autistic Nazi salute game is stronger than ever.” Together, these examples show how symbols can carry harmful messages under the guise of humor or meme culture. As platforms struggle to keep up, the need for context-aware moderation becomes more urgent. Identifying emojis alone isn’t enough—we need to understand the messages they help construct.
