Anti-Defamation League (ADL)

The Anti-Defamation League was founded in 1913 on a proposal by the Chicago attorney Sigmund Livingston to create an organization with a mission “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” That sentence remains its stated mission. The IRS record for the entity (EIN 13-1818723) carries a June 1948 ruling date and a New York address at 605 Third Avenue; it reported total revenue of $38.3 million and total assets of$67.1 million for the 2023 tax year. Related entities, including the ADL Foundation, file separately.

Early history

ADL’s own history places its founding against the background of the Leo Frank case: Frank, a Jewish businessman, was convicted in a trial the organization describes as defined by antisemitism and was lynched by a mob in 1915 after the governor commuted his death sentence. ADL later helped secure his posthumous pardon on the ground that Georgia had failed to protect him in custody.

Center on Extremism

ADL’s Center on Extremism researches extremist movements and provides intelligence to law enforcement. Its documented work includes providing intelligence about extremists’ plans to attend the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and monitoring the rally and its aftermath.

Center for Technology and Society

In 2017 ADL’s chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, announced the founding of the ADL Center for Technology & Society, established “to monitor, track, analyze and mitigate hate speech and harassment in online spaces.” Its recurring output includes Online Hate and Harassment: The American Experience, an annual nationally representative survey of how many American adults experience hate or harassment on social media, extended since 2022 to teenagers aged 13 to 17. The 2024 edition reported that severe online hate and harassment rose four points year on year, and attributed possible causes to the surge in antisemitism following the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, reductions in platform enforcement and researcher data access, and new threats from generative AI tools.

Relevance to digital political discourse

ADL runs a repeated annual survey of online hate and harassment and publishes the results publicly, and it campaigns directly on platform and cyber-harassment legislation — the 2024 report’s landing page calls on Congress to pass the Doxing Threat Assessment Act. Its 2024 findings explicitly link its measured increase to reduced platform enforcement and reduced researcher access to platform data.