Dr. Matthias J. Becker

About

Matthias J. Becker is a linguist specializing in pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and discourse analysis. He is an AddressHate Research Scholar at New York University's (NYU) Center for the Study of Antisemitism, a postdoctoral researcher at the Woolf Institute at the University of Cambridge, and editor-in-chief of the Digital Hate Review. Since 2020, he has led the Decoding Antisemitism team, which investigates antisemitism in digital spaces using mixed-method approaches—qualitative discourse analysis combined with AI-supported detection. The multilingual corpus he has built, with over 300,000 annotated comments, has set international methodological standards. He is currently setting up a follow-up project at NYU called Decoding Hate, which contrasts different ideologies of hate. In addition, he is conducting research at the Weizenbaum Institute in the research group “Dynamics of Digital News Communication” on mechanisms of anti-Semitic and anti-democratic communication and analyzes how social media contributes to the spread and normalization of hate speech.

He studied linguistics, philosophy, and literature at Freie Universität Berlin and earned his PhD at TU Berlin in 2017 on antisemitic projections in German and British media discourse. Since 2020, he has led the international project Decoding Antisemitism (TU Berlin, University of Cambridge), which combines qualitative discourse analysis with quantitative and AI-based approaches. His publications include monographs, edited volumes, and numerous studies on antisemitism, digital hate communication, and social media studies.

In addition to his research, he advises institutions such as the European Commission, the U.S. Department of State, as well as companies like META. In 2024, he edited the Decoding Antisemitism Lexicon, comprising more than 45 contributions. Becker is committed to fostering knowledge transfer between academia, politics, and civil society.

Project: DECORA – Decoding Online Right-Wing Antisemitism

Research Group: Digital News Dissemination