If you’re on Facebook or Instagram, you’ve almost certainly encountered Reels, Meta’s answer to TikTok’s short-form video content that is so wildly popular with “the youth”. Reels are frequently interspersed in feeds and are optimised to make you wonder just enough to click. Once you’ve started watching, it’s very easy to just keep swiping through “related” content. As with other media websites, that “related” can often mean you’re only a few swipes away from some deeply disturbing and harmful content, such as medical misinformation, conspiracy theories, and bigotry, often all in one reel!
I’ve wanted to write about Reels for a while, as just another easy access point for people to encounter damaging and radicalising content, but that feels so par for the course these days it didn’t seem worth the cataloguing of well-documented horrors. That is, until… Jewtlantis:
It’s gonna be that kind of article. There are so many things wrong with just this image, not least of which is calling it ‘Jewtlantis’ when ‘Jewlantis’ is right there. I’d imagine that is a result of this being the sort of AI-generated slop slowly filling up every corner of the internet.
For many, the first coherent question they will manage to get out is some form of “who is making this content and why?”, the quaint sort of questions one might have expected to get answers to in the before times. A proper investigative journalist could probably track down more concrete answers to those questions, but I’m a pro-bono amateur gonzo journalist at best, so here’s what I found:
According to Instagram, Cyber-Zionist came online in January of 2025 and is based in Israel. It is also currently not affiliated with any memecoins, but it does associate its work with Kabbalistic sci-fi – a sort of Jewish spirituality-based reimagining of science fiction stories, similar to the Afrofuturism portrayed in media like Black Panther and HBO’s Lovecraft Country. While that may be their genuine goal, the implementation here is deeply flawed and likely to promote both unfounded antisemitic conspiracy theories and well-founded concerns about Zionist colonialism.
To understand why, we need to look at their larger body of work before we return to Jewtlantis. Many of their videos involve applying the same sort of AI-generated Jewish gloss to pop culture material, or sometimes random clickbaity material like cute animals or people working out at the gym. You’ve got Jewrasic Park, Game of Jews, Jews of the Caribbean and, my personal favourite, Jewhammer 40k:
We talk a lot about the death of satire, but not enough about how it has reincarnated as something far more mind-destroying. They even have a Jewish Rick and Morty, which honestly feels like something you’d see in the show. If this sort of cringe were all there was to the account, we could give this a pass. But then there’s Jewtlantis.
This is indistinguishable from Bioshock, a game series that heavily satirises extremist ideologies and the dystopian hellscapes they produce, which should be a red flag! The moral of Bioshock is not “we should also try to build an ideologically pure underwater empire”. Don’t take it from me though, the Nazis in the comments section have no trouble drawing the same comparison:
On top of serving as perfectly crafted content for Nazis, it’s crucial to remember that the story of Atlantis was popularised in the modern age by racists as a way to square White Supremacist narratives of history with the existence of significant non-white societies and the megastructures they built around the world. Combined with ancient alien pseudoscience, Atlantis was such a focal point for racist pseudohistory that the Nazis built a futuristic house dedicated to studying it.
Now, one major aspect of Afrofuturism and other approaches to sci-fi is to retell famous sci-fi stories from the perspective of marginalised communities who have been historically excluded or portrayed in racist ways in those contexts. Cyberzionist might try to argue they’re simply doing the same with Atlantis, but there are two things wrong with that.
Firstly, retellings of the Atlantis myths often involve Jews causing the downfall of Atlantis, usually out of jealousy or greed, and often in ways where they’re accused of secretly controlling advanced technology, such as Jewish space lasers. These glossy AI images are so perfectly designed to feed into those particular conspiracy theories, it is reasonable to wonder if Cyberzionist is actually a Nazi false flag psy-op, despite all evidence suggesting the creator is genuine in their Zionist messaging.
The bigger problem is that, in promoting an explicitly ethnonationalist vision of the future, they have abandoned the emancipatory ideal at the heart of futurism. Whatever kind of futurism, the shared goal is envisioning a future free from the suffering caused by colonialism, ethnonationalism, and any other dominance hierarchies. The protagonists in Black Panther begin in a place of xenophobia, but over the course of the story they learn that isolationism is not an ethical way of life. Shuri was right. By abandoning those ideals in favour of Zionism, Cyberzionist produces content that is both exclusionary and threatening, akin to the fascist visions of a shiny future where all non-White people are noticeably absent.
The colonialist aspects of Cyberzionists art is most explicit in the videos where they Jewify other cultures:
If this was the only image you saw, I could once again understand laughing it off as just being Internet-town, but the one on Indigenous American cultures makes the problem impossible to ignore:
This is really bad on so many levels. It is hugely racist towards these cultures to use stereotypical images of them and then slap Stars of David and Menorahs everywhere. It’s planting a colonial flag in a dehumanised culture, erasing indigenous people’s agency along with their identity. The image once again implies that these people could not have possibly built such a structure without the help of a more advanced culture.
As I discussed when covering the Hoteps, Jews are often seen as a malevolent race of literal space aliens. These videos reinforce a host of horrifying antisemitic conspiracy theories that claim Jews have controlled events across the planet since the dawn of civilisation. They are portrayed as always existing as either adversaries of society, parasites that feed on it, or the secret masters that are guiding it towards their nefarious ends. Again, it is impossible to look at that image and not at least wonder if this is a Nazi psy-op account. The comments sections are full of Nazis spewing hate speech, but also people claiming to be Jewish who think the content is inspiring. Poe’s L’chaim.
So, what is there to take away from the Parable of Jewtlantis, beyond the desperate need to help people comprehend that media like Bioshock is a warning, not a recommendation? We can see our likely dystopian future, where AI eliminates the barriers to flooding the world with reactionary slop that effectively reinforces bigoted biases and disinformation. We can hold out hope that genuinely emancipatory futurism will win out over all forms of colonialism in the longer term, but in the near term we’re in for a brutal ride to the ocean floor.
