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, Project Lead of DECORA at the Weizenbaum Institute in the research group "Dynamics of Digital News Communication," and Editor-in-Chief of the Digital Hate Review. His research focuses on mechanisms of antisemitic and anti-democratic communication and the role of social media in 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, HTW Berlin, and King's College London), which combines qualitative discourse analysis with quantitative and AI-based methods to investigate antisemitism in digital spaces. The multilingual corpus he built, comprising over 300,000 annotated comments, has set international methodological standards. He is currently developing Decoding Hate, a follow-on project at NYU that examines different hate ideologies comparatively.

His publications include monographs, edited volumes, and numerous articles on antisemitism, digital hate communication, and social media studies. In 2024, he edited the Decoding Antisemitism Lexicon, comprising 46 contributions. In addition to his research, he advises institutions such as the European Commission and the U.S. Department of State, as well as companies like Meta, and is committed to fostering knowledge transfer between academia, politics, and civil society.

Project: DECORA – Decoding Online Right-Wing Antisemitism

Research Group: Digital News Dissemination