White nationalist Trump fans spew anti-Semitic tweets at journalists

Andrew Anglin isn't allowed on Twitter, but he still shapes an immense amount of the anti-Semitic harassment that takes place there.

In May, journalist Julia Ioffe published an article in GQ about Melania Trump, the former model and wife of the Republican presidential nominee.

Anglin, a Trump supporter and self-described white supremacist, felt the article wasn't great publicity for Trump, and decided to launch a harassment campaign against Ioffe from his well-trafficked "number one alt-right and pro-genocide" website, The Daily Stormer.

On the website, he directed his followers to "please go ahead and send her a tweet and let her know what you think of her dirty k*ke trickery. Make sure to identify her as a Jew working against White interests, or send her the picture with the Jewish star from the top of the article."

Anglin's followers bombarded Ioffe with anti-Semitic vitriol that included photoshopped imagery that placed her face over the faces of Holocaust victims.

Anti-Semitic harassment has been a staple of how this election has played out on social media, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Anti-Defamation League.

A huge portion of that harassment comes from Twitter users who identify as Trump supporters and white nationalists. The ADL tracked down 2.6 million tweets "containing language frequently found in anti-Semitic speech" between August 2015 and July that totaled 10 billion impressions.

Anti-Semitic tweets targeted around 800 journalists, and most of those tweets came from just 1,600 Twitter users, 21 percent of whom were suspended from the social media network while the ADL was gathering information for the study.

Anti-Semitic tweets shot up in the first half of 2016, which the report said corresponds with "intensifying coverage of the presidential campaign."

A "considerable number" of those tweets came from users who identify as "nationalist," "white," and "conservative," and plenty of them support Donald Trump.

The ADL's findings dovetail with those in a study published earlier this year by J.M. Berger, a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, which found that white nationalist movements on Twitter have boosted their following by 600 percent since 2012.

Many of those white nationalists identify as Nazis or use Nazi imagery.

And, like the ADL's study, Berger's report found that those who identified as white nationalists were often huge supporters of Donald Trump.