Hi folks, Kylie Robison from the tech team. This week, Elon Musk proved yet again that someone needs to cut off his posting access.
It started on Wednesday when someone on X, formerly Twitter, highlighted the surge of anti-Semitism on the platform. This unsettling pattern, which has been well documented by watchdog groups including the Anti-Defamation League, has infamously made users and advertisers nervous about using the service.
Another X user responded by spouting an extremely dangerous anti-Semitic conspiracy theory asserting that Jewish people are plotting to flood the U.S. with people of color, all in a strategic move to counter and overthrow the white race. “Jewish commun[i]ties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them," the person wrote.
As noted by The Atlantic, this very conspiracy theory was espoused by the man who murdered 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, the deadliest anti-Semitic attack on U.S. soil. The fact that it's being posted on X in the guise of a discussion (and that it remains posted), only proves what data has been saying about X under Musk's ownership. An analysis of the platform, first reported by the Washington Post, found a 105% increase in anti-Semitic posts after Musk bought the platform for $44 billion last October. Now, the platform is worth about $19 billion, with a great deal of the lost value probably a result of Musk’s own tweeting habits.
Instead of banning this kind of atrociously racist and anti-Semitic behavior into the ether, never to be seen again, Musk actually engages with it—and endorses it!
“You have said the actual truth,” Musk responded to the post.
Look, it’s hard to find the words for just how bad this is. On one hand, the obvious problem that many have gone to great lengths to explain is that Musk is amplifying a rhetoric that has quite literally cost innocent lives. The richest man in the world, and the most followed man on the platform he owns, should never engage with this type of content. In fact, it should be swiftly removed! His advertisers think so too, which leads me to the second issue at hand.
Musk, who doesn’t have a foot left to shoot at this point, is bleeding essential advertisers at X. Understandably, companies aren’t keen to spend money to place their products next to harmful content. IBM announced on Thursday that it will cease advertising on X after a report by Media Matters for America revealed that IBM's ads had been displayed alongside tweets promoting Nazi ideology, the Washington Post reported.
In June, Musk hired X CEO Linda Yaccarino to lure back advertisers while he continues to do and post whatever he wants. I wrote last month about the company’s secret PR man who works quietly alongside Yaccarino and under Musk’s nose because the company’s optics are just that bad, but as Musk likes to say, “‘Public Relations’ is a propaganda word for propaganda.” Musk also demolished the company’s trust and safety teams so, let’s see how that goes for him.
So, in Yaccarino fashion, she worked swiftly to mop up the mess, posting that X has “been extremely clear” about its "efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination."
“There's no place for it anywhere in the world -- it's ugly and wrong. Full stop,” Yaccarino posted.
“Talk to your boss. He needs to fix this. And stop encouraging it, amplifying it, or posting it himself,” a user responded. “Good luck.”
Kylie Robison
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Today’s edition was curated by David Meyer.
