FOXBOROUGH, Massachusetts (JTA) — For the past five years, a specialty “command center” that researches antisemitism has been operating inside the New England Patriots’ home stadium in this Boston suburb.

Wall-sized screens, refreshed every minute, show live updates on public conversation topics related to antisemitism. Tweets featuring antisemitic dog whistles are also blasted onto an enormous dashboard — hand-me-down technology formerly used by the Patriots during team practice to run plays.

The command center is where the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate monitors more than 1 billion social media posts every day. It’s a project of the Patriots’ Jewish owner Robert Kraft, the Boston-area philanthropist who founded the alliance in 2019.

On Tuesday, the nonprofit anti-hate organization announced the formation of a new advisory board featuring a slate of high-profile names: former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav; Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan; Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff; and Dentons CEO Kate Barton.

The advisory board will guide the organization on strategy and “deepen institutional relationships,” its website said.

The statement said the board will help further the mission of the roughly dozen analysts who staff the command center. They monitor trends in antisemitic rhetoric online, craft research reports based on their findings, and use search engine optimization to make links with their resources float to the top of Google search results. The wall-sized screens are filled with word clouds, pie charts, bar graphs, tweets, and Facebook posts, detailing what everyday Americans encounter online.

Since the bloody October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught on southern Israel, the Blue Square Alliance has been on particularly high alert, monitoring shifts in the online conversation around antisemitism, which often included ordinary social media users swapping the word “Zionist” for “Jew” in derogatory ways, the group says. But in late February, when the United States and Israel entered the war with Iran, the Blue Square Alliance began noticing new trends in their data.

“What we saw, especially right after the operation began, is Hitler glorification was the first thing to spike,” Rotem Leiba, a lead analyst at Blue Square Alliance said. “In terms of all the antisemitic things we’ve seen happening at this time, Hitler glorification was the first to spike.”

Using Brandwatch, the social media monitoring software, the team found that terms like “Hitler was right,” “We owe Hitler an apology,” and “Hitler knew what he was doing” appeared with increasing frequency — more than they did in the aftermath of October 7. A new term, “Hitler in heaven,” also began popping up across social media, topping similar sentiments at 21.4 million impressions.

One area they are still investigating is bots: studies have shown that automated software programs frequently amplify levels of hate speech.

“We are starting to talk to other........

© The Times of Israel