The moderators of the Reddit community dedicated to the Eurovision Song Contest shut down the page entirely for 12 hours after the Grand Final in the early morning hours of Sunday due to “hate speech and strong emotional reactions.”
A barrage of online comments fuming about the results of the competition on Saturday focused on Israel’s nearly successful run to the top of the rankings, winning the popular vote but ultimately coming in second place to Austria.
People cheer as they watch the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest finals being screened at a community center in Tel Aviv, Israel, on May 17, 2025. (MAYA LEVIN/AFP via Getty Images)
Many commenters accused the Israeli government of “rigging” the popular vote to distort the true popular will, while others demanded that the contest, in which Israel has participated since 1973 and won four times, ban the country.
The online outrage accompanied weeks of far-left and pro-Hamas protests against Israel’s participation and its representative, singer Yuval Raphael, who survived the Hamas siege of the country on October 7, 2023, and performed a song, “New Day Will Rise,” about the potential to move forward from trauma.
A coalition of 72 anti-Israel former Eurovision acts published a letter prior to the contest demanding the country be ousted from the competition, a repeat of an attempt to expel the country last year by 1,000 Swedish artists via open letter. A pro-Palestinian mob swarmed the “Turquoise Carpet,” the opening event of the Eurovision Song Contest featuring a parade of its competitors, and booed Raphael during her appearance.
One protester was filmed making throat-slitting gestures at Raphael, who survived the Hamas attack on the Nova Music Festival by hiding under a pile of dead bodies for hours.
Israel is also facing opposition to its presence at the event from pro-Hamas heads of state. The socialist prime minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, urged organizers to oust Israel from Eurovision on Monday on behalf of “the people of Palestine who are experiencing the injustice of war and bombardment.” Spanish broadcaster RTVE violated the contest’s “no politics” rule on Saturday by airing a message prior to the song contest reading, “In the face of human rights, silence is not an option. Peace and justice for Palestine.”
RTVE did not express similar sympathy for the 1,200 dead and hundreds of other victims of the October 7 Hamas attack, including Raphael.
Eurovision is a competition in which competing nations – most of them European, but also including countries friendly to the European Broadcast Union (EBU) such as Australia and Azerbaijan – send an artist to perform an original song annually. The contest was originally devised as a way to unite the continent and prevent a third world war, channeling nationalist sentiments in a healthy manner. The winner is decided through a combination of a jury vote and a popular vote. Each country organizes a jury of professional musicians, given a set number of points to hand out to their favorites. The public can vote online or by phone and their points are distributed based on which acts receive the most popular votes. These sums are added together to determine a winner.
The use of a jury has been controversial for years, as the expert jury tends to prefer more “serious” and vocally challenging acts to the flamboyant and often obnoxious performances the general public prefers. In 2023, for example, the jury caused an uproar for deciding the contest in favor of Swedish pop diva Loreen’s song “Tattoo” over “Cha Cha Cha,” a Finnish rap-metal entry by the artist Käärijä.
Anger also permeated the Eurovision fanbase in 2024 when Nemo’s “The Code,” a song about “non-binary” identity, defeated Croatia’s “Rim Tim Tagi Dim” by rapper Baby Lasagna. In an attempt to temper emotions, the EBU invited Käärijä and Baby Lasagna for a duet performance this year.
In contrast with the past two years, in which the jury has deprived “party” songs of the win, Raphael’s “New Day Will Rise” won the popular vote, receiving nearly 300 points – a decisive victory from the public. It was not enough to defeat the ultimate winner – and Breitbart News’ predicted Eurovision winner – opera singer JJ and his song “Wasted Love” from Austria, who decisively clinched the popular vote but received over 100 votes from the public, just enough to cement the title.
Reddit, a social media site notorious for a far-left bias, erupted in outrage at how well-received Israel’s song was received by the public, accusing the Israel government, without evidence, of using “bots” to falsify national televote results.
“I believe they’re making a travesty of the competition and using it for political goals,” one commenter fumed. “And they’ve also been smart about it. They are suspiciously high on the list, but there’s no chance that they’d be able to hold the contest in 2026 for security reasons.”
Others blamed the EBU for allegedly “encourag[ing] bot farming” through the televote.
These comments appeared on subreddits, or Reddit pages dedicated to specific topics, for other themes, however, as the official Eurovision page was shut down shortly after JJ’s victory. Reddit moderators are volunteers and are not paid for their work.
“Due to the influx of traffic to our subreddit, a significant majority of which is hate speech and strong emotional reactions,” moderators wrote, “we feel it is necessary to temporarily lock down the subreddit so that our team can properly organise, and to hopefully give everyone time to cool off.”
The moderator team added a message after the 12-hour lockdown explaining that the page was being “bombarded with comments from users from outside of our community posting racist, homophobic, antisemitic, Islamophobic, and other hateful comments,” without offering specifics.
“Our options were either forcing several members of the team, who’d already been actively working throughout the evening, to stay up all night reading some of the worst hate speech there is,” they explained, “which can be exhausting for even the most seasoned of moderators, or give the team time to regroup, plan, look after kids and pets, and most importantly – rest, to avoid burnout.”
Sentiments of hatred against Israel were not limited to Reddit. Pro-Hamas protesters attempted to attack Raphael during her Grand Final performance, Swiss broadcaster SRG SRR confirmed on Sunday, but failed after being intercepted by security personnel.
“At the end of the Israeli performance, a man and a woman tried to get over a barrier on to the stage. They were stopped. One of the two agitators threw paint and a crew member was hit,” the broadcaster confirmed.
A spokesperson for KAN, the Israeli national broadcaster, described Raphael as “shaken and upset.”
Raphael was nonetheless positive following her popular victory at the contest.
“I feel like we’ve won at life,” she told KAN. “I don’t know how to explain it. I’ll be grateful for this situation every day of my life, I’ll be grateful for our nation every day of my life.”
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