When Political Ambiguity Does Not Stay Ambiguous: How digital circulation transforms contested speech — and why this matters now
AddressHate Research Scholar at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism | Postdoc, University of Cambridge | Lead, Decoding Antisemitism | Research Advisor, AddressHate
About This Essay
This essay is a condensed and publicly accessible version of a research report developed in the context of my Decoding Antisemitism project and co-authored with Gabrielle Beacken (University of Texas at Austin) and Liora Sabra (NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism).
The full research report, titled “How Political Ambiguity Transforms Across Digital Platforms: Mechanisms of Discourse Radicalization in the Case of Zohran Mamdani,” is openly available via the NYU UltraViolet repository and can be accessed here.
While the complete report presents the empirical analysis, methodological design, and quantitative findings in full detail, the present essay translates its core arguments for a broader, non-academic readership. It focuses in particular on the dynamics of political discourse, influencer reframing, and participatory escalation in digital environments, while retaining the implications of the research for the study of antisemitism, online radicalization, and contemporary media ecosystems.
Introduction
Since October 7, 2023 — the Hamas attacks on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza — public discourse about Israel and Palestine has intensified in volume, speed, and volatility. Political statements that once circulated primarily through institutional media now travel fluidly across platforms, influencer networks, and participatory audiences. Along the way, they are clipped, reframed, moralized, memefied, and reinterpreted — often producing outcomes that far exceed what any original speaker explicitly said or intended.
A recurring pattern has become increasingly difficult to ignore. Political statements framed as legitimate critique repeatedly reappear downstream as overtly antisemitic discourse. This has fueled a predictable but unsatisfying debate. Critics blame algorithms, platform toxicity, or radical audiences. Defenders respond that the original speech was not antisemitic and cannot be held responsible for how others interpret it. Both positions rest on an outdated model of communication in which meaning is transmitted linearly from speaker to listener.
The core problem is that political speech does not move through digital environments intact. It transforms. This article shows that when the same political event is reframed conspiratorially by influential opinion makers, the prevalence of antisemitic discourse within audience responses increases dramatically — even though the underlying news trigger remains identical.
This article examines how ambiguous political discourse changes as it circulates through layered digital ecosystems, and why ambiguity — often treated as a democratic safeguard — becomes structurally unstable in participatory media environments. The argument is not that political ambiguity is inherently malicious, nor that criticism of Israel is equivalent to antisemitism. It is that in circulation-driven platforms, ambiguity does not remain neutral. It invites completion — and the direction of that completion is shaped decisively by human intermediaries.
Ambiguity is not intent
Ambiguous political language is not evidence of hidden motives. Ambiguity can arise from coalition politics, institutional constraints, inherited activist vocabularies, genuine moral uncertainty, or attempts to speak across polarized constituencies. In democratic discourse, ambiguity is often understood as a virtue — a way to preserve pluralism, prevent premature closure, or keep dialogue open.
This analysis does not infer politicians’ private beliefs, nor does it assume covert dogwhistling. Intent is not the metric here. The object of analysis is what ambiguity does once it enters digital circulation. This is a study of discursive mechanics, not moral psychology.
From speech to circulation
Public debate still tends to assume a linear communication model: a speaker speaks, an audience interprets, and responsibility resides primarily with wording and intent. That model made sense when speech was ephemeral, audiences were bounded, and intermediaries were institutional gatekeepers.
Those conditions no longer apply.
Today, political statements move through layered circulation systems. They are excerpted by influencers, reframed into platform-specific narratives, embedded in affective and ideological contexts, and transformed into participatory raw material. Meaning is not transmitted; it is reconstructed. The central question is no longer whether a statement can be interpreted in problematic ways, but which interpretations are stabilized, amplified, and normalized as it travels.
In contemporary digital ecosystems, influencers function as de facto editors of political meaning, shaping not only how political speech is interpreted, but how it is stabilized over time within public discourse.
Why this case matters
To observe these dynamics empirically, the underlying study focuses on the digital circulation of statements by Zohran Mamdani, concerning Israel, Palestine, antisemitism, and political violence. This case is not chosen to single out an individual, nor to adjudicate political legitimacy. It is chosen because it offers an unusually clear analytical window: Mamdani’s rhetoric combines explicit opposition to antisemitism with formulations that remain open to divergent interpretations, generating sustained controversy and high digital circulation.
That combination — high ambiguity, high circulation, high engagement — allows for systematic analysis of how political meaning transforms as it moves from elite speech to influencer reframing to audience participation. The goal is not to judge Mamdani’s intentions, but to understand how ambiguous political discourse collapses into explicit antisemitic expression in participatory environments — and under what conditions it does not.
A three-phase model of digital transformation
The study treats political discourse as a multi-phase circulation process rather than a single communicative act.
At the first phase, elite political speech introduces ambiguity. At this level, ambiguity remains open. Competing interpretations coexist, but none is dominant, and discourse is still anchored to institutional norms such as interviews, journalistic mediation, and expectations of accountability. At this stage, antisemitic discourse remains rare.
The decisive shift occurs at the second phase: influencer reframing. Influencers do not merely repeat political statements; they translate them. They select excerpts, impose narrative structures, provide emotional cues, and align content with ideological expectations. In doing so, they reduce interpretive openness. Ambiguity begins to crystallize.
Two mechanisms matter most here. Influencers embed political speech within broader narratives — anti-imperialism, anti-elite critique, systemic oppression, or populist skepticism — and they supply affective signals such as outrage, certainty, moral urgency, or irony. These cues guide audiences not only on what to think, but how to feel.
The third phase unfolds in participatory spaces, such as comment sections. Here, ambiguity collapses. Participation rewards completion. Users escalate interpretations, compete for social validation, and push implicit meanings toward explicit claims. Over time, norms shift and what once seemed extreme becomes normalized.
Together, these phases form a structured sequence: ambiguity in elite speech, crystallization through influencer framing, and collapse in participatory discourse.
What we actually measured
To test whether ambiguous political speech itself produces antisemitism — or whether outcomes depend on how ambiguity is mediated — the study analyzed discourse across three layers of circulation.
At the primary level, four public appearances by Mamdani were examined, each addressing Israel–Palestine–related issues with language open to competing interpretations. At the secondary level, nine long-form influencer videos (approximately 91 minutes total) from four progressive political creators were analyzed; these videos reframed the same underlying political material rather than introducing new content. At the tertiary level, 3,404 audience comments were systematically sampled from 17 video postings across YouTube and TikTok, including cross-platform reposts.
These patterns held across both YouTube and TikTok, suggesting that framing effects outweighed platform-specific cultures or affordances.
This design allowed comparison of how the same political source material generated different audience outcomes depending on framing strategy, while controlling for platform, time period, and political context.
How antisemitism was identified — conservatively
Because the Israel–Palestine discourse is highly contested, the study used conservative coding principles developed in the Decoding Antisemitism project. Content was classified as antisemitic only when sufficient contextual and intertextual evidence supported that interpretation. When a comment permitted both a prejudiced and a non-prejudiced reading, it was coded as non-antisemitic — meaning the reported figures likely underestimate rather than exaggerate prevalence.
Five forms of antisemitic discourse were tracked: denial or relativization of antisemitism, victim–perpetrator reversal, delegitimization of Jewish institutions or Israel as such, conspiratorial attribution of political power, and Holocaust inversion. Criticism of Israeli policy, opposition to war, or support for Palestinian rights were not coded as antisemitic unless they activated these patterns.
Same source, radically different outcomes
The most striking empirical result is not that antisemitism appears online — that is, unfortunately, not new — but how dramatically its prevalence varies under controlled conditions.
Across the dataset, antisemitic comments ranged from low single-digit percentages in some videos to over thirty percent in others — an approximately eightfold difference. This variation cannot be explained by platform culture, algorithmic amplification alone, audience self-selection, or differences in the political source material. In several cases, the same influencer, on the same platform, discussing the same politician, produced radically different outcomes depending on framing choices.
In short: audiences did not change; framing did.
The decisive variable: empathy vs. conspiracy framing
The dominant explanatory distinction lies between empathy-oriented framing and conspiracy-oriented framing.
Empathy-oriented framing foregrounds humanitarian suffering, moral tragedy, and the limits of certainty. It preserves interpretive openness and discourages collective blame. Where this framing dominates, antisemitic discourse remains marginal.
Conspiracy-oriented framing, by contrast, emphasizes hidden power, elite manipulation, suppression of “real” public opinion, and structural control by vaguely specified or euphemistically named actors. This framing dramatically narrows interpretive space. Ambiguity is no longer open-ended; it is resolved through attribution of intent, coordination, and collective responsibility.
Crucially, conspiracy-oriented influencer framing generates nearly eight times more antisemitic audience responses than empathy-oriented framing of the same political speech. This is the single strongest quantitative finding of the study.
Importantly, conspiracy framing is not itself necessarily antisemitic. Rather, it supplies a causal grammar — politics as hidden coordination, disagreement as deception, outcomes as deliberate manipulation — that invites audiences to identify agents behind perceived power. In practice, this often meant that influencer references to vague “elite power” or “suppressed truths” were taken up in comment sections as increasingly specific claims about who controls media, politics, or public discourse — a shift from structural critique to personalized attribution. In historically saturated discourse environments, that completion reliably activates antisemitic tropes.
Where antisemitism actually enters the discourse
Another key finding concerns where antisemitism appears. It is rare in elite political speech, uneven in influencer commentary, and densest in participatory spaces. Comment sections do not invent antisemitic narratives from nothing; they extend and intensify interpretive cues that have already been made salient upstream.
This is why dismissing comment sections as mere noise is misleading. They are reactive environments. They reveal which interpretations have been normalized, authorized, and emotionally primed. When influencers frame politics as a struggle against concealed power, audiences respond by naming that power — often through historically familiar antisemitic patterns.
The uncomfortable implication
One of the most uncomfortable implications of this analysis is that radicalization does not require extremists. The strongest amplification effects occurred not in fringe spaces, but in mainstream progressive ecosystems that see themselves as morally serious and anti-racist.
Ambiguity plays a central role here. It allows morally charged narratives to circulate without triggering immediate resistance. It delays accountability while enabling alignment. Once participatory dynamics take over, the result is not fringe hate speech but normalized hostility — expressed as political insight, moral clarity, or courageous truth-telling.
What this means
Three conclusions follow.
First, ambiguous political speech does not automatically produce antisemitism, but it can enable it under specific circulation conditions. Second, influencer framing is the single most powerful determinant of downstream outcomes. Third, participatory spaces do not distort discourse randomly; they complete what upstream actors leave open.
The implication is not censorship, nor the end of political critique. It is a shift in responsibility. In digital environments, responsibility does not end with intent or wording. It extends to how speech is framed, circulated, moralized, and amplified by those who function as intermediaries.
When amplified by influential intermediaries, ambiguity becomes a powerful engine of discursive normalization — shaping not just momentary outrage, but enduring trends in how groups are discussed, blamed, and morally positioned.