Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as U.S. antisemitism special envoy, warned in an interview with Jewish Insider that inaccurate, inflammatory content is being allowed to spread on social media, and pledged to work with social networks to curb the spread of antisemitic falsehoods online. 

“The ideal outcome is, I want to continue America’s tradition of free speech and allowing free speech anywhere and everywhere, freedom of expression,” Kaploun said. “But I would like the platforms — because of the advent of AI and those technologies, you have the ability to recognize when something is not factually correct and it should be labeled as such. I think that’s something that we’d like to target.” 

Kaploun spoke to JI on Wednesday, with his Senate confirmation vote for the State Department role expected this month before the holiday recess. His comments about working with social media platforms to label misinformation contradict  the approach of the Trump administration, which has urged the major platforms not to “censor” information. Earlier this year, after Trump took office, Meta announced the end of its fact-checking program, and YouTube eased many of its content moderation policies. 

“There’s many other areas of working with the companies — the algorithms and things that have been now proven, that bots are busy promoting antisemitic rhetoric on the internet, how we get to some of that and preventing some of that. These are very tall tasks. These are not things that occur overnight,” said Kaploun, a Chabad-trained rabbi and businessman from Miami. “But I truly believe there is a true willingness of many people within the administration to tackle these problems and confront them head on, globally.” 

As an example of the kind of content he would seek to flag as false, Kaploun referred to a July New York Times article about the hunger that many civilians in Gaza were experiencing during Israel’s war against Hamas. The Times published a correction regarding the article several days after it was published, once it was revealed that a child who was featured prominently in the article as an example of malnutrition had preexisting health conditions. 

The misrepresentation in the photo could contribute to antisemitism, according to Kaploun, who suggested that the article had been viewed hundreds of times more than the correction. 

“I’m not exactly 100% sure of the actual number, but in that realm, a total disbalance and disproportionate view of people saw something that could be creating antisemitic behavior,” said Kaploun. “All those people that saw it have incorrect information.” 

He declined to say whether he believes social networks should have removed posts that included that article. 

“I’m not going to get into the specifics or the semantics of what that’s going to look like. We are going to work collectively and together with these companies and try and come up with productive solutions that will lower the disinformation and lower the hatred,” Kaploun said. “That’s what I’d like to work with these social media platforms to do a better job with, recognizing that and making sure that we can do a better job of getting accurate facts out.”

Discussing strategy, Kaploun laid out a vision for his tenure as special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, stating that his first priority would be to fight antisemitism with “pro-Semitism” — teaching about Jewish history and culture, and convincing countries and groups that are experiencing antisemitism that Jews are productive members of society and contribute a great deal to the countries in which they live.

“What I mean by pro-Semitism is to explain to countries the benefits of what it is the Jewish nation provides, and our historical perspective of what the Jewish communities have always done for communities, in terms of growth in countries,” said Kaploun. “The countries that have literally attacked the Jews and expelled the Jews don’t always have success, and there’s a reason for that. And when countries are welcoming and when Jews are in countries, usually the benefits far exceed any type of whatever detriments [there] are. There really aren’t detriments.”

“It’s not all about Israel,” Kaploun added. “It’s about the Jewish culture, the Jewish religion, the Jewish sciences.” 

Still, he recognizes that separating Israel from discussions of antisemitism is not possible — like if he encounters people who insist that they have no problem with Jews, and that their only issue is with the Jewish state. 

“Understand the battle that Israel has to fight here,” said Kaploun. “You’re fighting a culture that was teaching children to kill themselves, that the benefit to get to heaven is to kill a Jewish person. So we have to get to the root causes. You want to condemn Israel, ‘Oh, I love the Jews, but I hate Israel.’ Why is Israel in existence? Because there was a period of time when Jews were being slaughtered throughout Europe and the world was silent and there wasn’t a country for the Jews to go to.”

Here, too, he said it all comes down to education.

“The importance of Israel may need to be explained, but at the same time, people’s facts are incorrect,” Kaploun said. “If they’re factually accurate, then you’re able to have a conversation with someone. They will see the folly of what they’re saying.”

Kaploun has a plan, he told JI, for where to kick off his work once he is confirmed by the Senate and moves into Foggy Bottom. 

“The president and the secretary [of state] are firmly behind the efforts that I am doing,” Kaploun said. “They’ve made it very, very clear that the administration is fully behind the efforts that we’re going to do to combat antisemitism.”  

On Thursday, NBC News reported a claim from Iran’s Ministry of Health that “over 2,500 injured people were treated in public and university hospitals, with 1,600 discharged and about 500 still hospitalized.” Earlier this week, CBS News reported 224 Iranians were dead from Israeli airstrikes, also attributed to Iran’s Ministry of Health.

There is no free press in Iran, and journalists have been arrested and imprisoned simply for practicing journalism in the Islamic Republic. There is no real way to verify the Iranian Health Ministry’s numbers, and so many journalists report them, unscrupulously.

In a fast-paced, constantly evolving news environment, accuracy is paramount. The ability to try to authenticate a statistic by attributing it to an official government source, while knowing that the source is unreliable, can serve as the basis for an inaccurate narrative with wide-ranging effects.

Take, for example, the Al-Alhi Hospital incident in October 2023, when the most widely read Western media outlets reported on an Israeli strike on a Gaza hospital, later confirmed to have been a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket. In the aftermath of the hospital incident — which many outlets, including The New York Times, had to walk back — Jordanian King Abdullah II canceled an in-person summit with President Joe Biden in Amman, potentially altering the course of the conflict.

“Israel strikes Iranian state TV, warns people to evacuate Tehran after accusing Iran of targeting civilians,” was a CBS News headline on Monday evening. Hours prior, an Iranian ballistic missile salvo targeted dozens of locations across the country — with one missile landing in the heart of a residential area of Tel Aviv. 

Further missing in reports of fatalities in the region is the identity of those killed. Take, for example, an Israeli attack in December on the port of Hodeidah and Sana’a airport in Yemen, both utilized by the Houthis. “At least four people were killed and 21 others injured in the attack,” according to the New York Times report on the strike, filed by journalists in Israel and the United Arab Emirates who cited Yemeni state-run media and the country’s Ministry of Health. 

Why were those people at a Houthi port known for serving as a point of transfer for Iranian weapons? Were those who were killed Houthi officials? Were they engaged in activity that posed an active and immediate threat to Israelis? The reader will never know anything beyond that the numbers provided by the Houthi-run Health Ministry in Yemen “could not be independently verified.”

It’s a regular occurrence in Israel-related reporting, where reports on West Bank clashes fail to mention when those killed are members of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or one of the many armed militant groups operating in the territory. 

More than 20 months after Hamas terrorists tore through southern Israel, raping, burning and killing people and destroying obstacles in their way, foreign reporters in the region continue to use casualty figures from the terror group’s Gaza Ministry of Health, noting only that the group doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Concerns over the reliance on the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry were so severe that American legislators passed — on a bipartisan basis — an amendment to last year’s State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations bill barring the State Department from using the health ministry’s statistics. Read our report here.

An ABC News report from earlier this week on violence near humanitarian aid distribution sites in Gaza leads with the headline “More than 30 killed at controversial foundation’s aid distribution sites in Gaza: Health officials,” giving an air of legitimacy to the claim — even though a reader would have to move down to the story before learning that those health officials came from the “Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health.” And nowhere in the story does ABC News note that the Gaza Health Ministry doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.

The inclination to publish talking points and statistics from terror groups and regimes incentivizes a playbook for malign actors — from Iran to the Houthis and Hamas — to provide misleading casualty figures for the media to carry that lack the intricacies and nuances necessary in such reporting.

And in this new media reality, misinformation and malign actors — already benefiting from  sympathetic media organizations — thrive.