Reddit is a major resource for AI training. It’s also a cesspit of antisemitism
“The No.1 most cited domain for AI across all models” ignores pleas from Jewish content moderators to curb the abuse in r/Israel and r/Jewish communities, raising fears that the content is being absorbed into AI systems like Gemini and ChatGPT.
Reddit, one of the internet’s largest content sources for AI training, is under scrutiny for hosting rampant antisemitism. A report by The Free Press shows that hateful language targeting Jews and Israel is being allowed to spread across the platform, raising fears that this content is being absorbed into AI systems like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, both of which use Reddit data for training.
Reddit has more than 100,000 active communities and over 110 million daily users. In its Q2 2025 letter to shareholders, it claimed it has become “the No.1 most cited domain for AI across all models.”
In 2024, Reddit had secured a $60 million AI content licensing deal with Google ahead of its IPO, making its content available for training the search engine giant's artificial intelligence models. This means that the longer that users are allowed to spread slurs and abuse across its platform and communities, the likelier it will become that hateful content and misinformation will become embedded in its algorithms.
The Free Press highlighted some of the content on the platform that was not deemed worthy of violating its policies. These include calls that “Judaism must be wiped clean off the face of the earth”, “Fuck the Jews”, and “Death to Zionism.” These slogans and chants can further be ingrained into outputs via Google, solidifying the sentiment to millions of users around the world.
The sentiment on the site has become so bad that Jewish moderators were warned or disciplined by the company for “report abuse”, undermining Jewish concerns and paving the way to silence Jewish voices while promoting pro-terror or antisemetic content on its platform and beyond. A Reddit spokesman later clarified that the company no longer punishes users for such actions, but the actions were causing moderators to highlight glaring inconsistencies put onto some minority groups but not others.
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As Israel recovers from the physical and digital fallout of the two-year war with Hamas, significant steps need to be taken to help restore its image and to counter false narratives that spread online. The fact that Reddit has not taken similar hard-line positions with respect to r/Israel and r/Jewish communities as it has with other areas of the site, such as communities promoting fat-shaming, anti-trans or anti-Muslim sentiment, or right-wing politics, shows its double standard and far-reaching consequence for Jewish communities, embedding hate into algorithms that shape the world’s most powerful AI systems.
According to the report, antisemitic comments like “Burn in hell u zionist pig” or “Judaism must be wiped clean off the face of the earth” are considered acceptable language on the site. When approached for comment, Reddit responded: “We’ve found that the reported content doesn’t violate Reddit’s Content Policy.”
As our world further slides into a space where algorithms are deciding what we read, see, or trust, Reddit’s indifference to these concerns doesn’t just fail the Jewish community, but it feeds into the bias that AI was supposed to avoid.
