The exodus of advertisers from X, formerly known as Twitter, is an existential risk for the company. But who’s to blame? Those who trust their own lying eyes might at least partly pin it on the explosion of toxic speech on the platform, which no longer polices such things very strongly since Elon Musk took over nearly a year ago. But as Musk sees it, those pointing out the hatred are the real bad guys here.
First, X sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that researches online hate speech. Musk accused the CCDH of trying to “harm Twitter’s business by driving advertisers away from the platform with incendiary claims”; the suit itself alleged that the group improperly gained access to X data. And now he’s going after the Anti-Defamation League, the most famous anti-antisemitism outfit in the U.S. As Fortune’s Christiaan Hetzner reports, Musk yesterday threatened to sue the ADL for at least $4 billion in damages for “trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it and me of being antisemitic.”
Musk’s threat of a defamation lawsuit followed his jaw-dropping assertion that “the ADL, because they are so aggressive in their demands to ban social media accounts for even minor infractions, are ironically the biggest generators of antisemitism on this platform!” (That was, by the way, in response to an X post by a far-right YouTuber who is trying to get the ADL banned from X.)
Musk claims to be “against antisemitism of any kind,” but, if that’s the case, he must be really mad at himself for repeatedly churning out the classics of the genre. Accusing Jews of being responsible for their own ill-treatment is one of them. So is the notion that Jews deviously control the hidden levers of power, which is pretty much how I (a descendant of German and Polish Jews, in case you’re wondering) interpret a post like this: “Advertisers avoid controversy, so all that is needed for ADL to crush our U.S. & European ad revenue is to make unfounded accusations… This ‘controversy’ causes advertisers to ‘pause’, but that pause is permanent until ADL gives the green light, which they will not do without us agreeing to secretly suspend or shadowban any account they don’t like.”
Then there’s the time he described the Jewish U.S. military vet Alexander Vindman as being “both puppet and puppeteer,” and the time he tweeted out a quote by neo-Nazi Kevin Alfred Strom, albeit misattributed to Voltaire. Whoops, right?
The best-case scenario here is that Musk isn’t being consciously antisemitic, but is rather displaying the inevitable consequences of bathing in a far-right sea of memes and tropes. Because it isn’t Jews who are scaring away X’s advertisers—it’s the fact that the company is run by a guy who only listens to one side of the political divide and seemingly takes delight in not serving the others, which is a lousy way to operate a so-called public town square.
Musk can claim to be “against antisemitism of any kind” until he’s blue in the face, but actions—and the company one keeps—matter a lot more than words do. More news below.
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David Meyer
