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Do you really want to be associated with the most vile public outpouring of antisemitism in American history?

Dear Linda YaccarinoDo you really want to be associated with the most vile public outpouring of antisemitism in American history?Claire BerlinskiSep 04, 20231346425ShareLinda Yaccarino, CEO of X.I wasn’t going to write about this because I assumed it would be all over the news, but it wasn’t. There was one brief article in Rolling Stone: Elon Musk Wades Deeper into Antisemitic Propaganda: A hashtag pushed by right-wing ideologues and rife with antisemitic content is trending on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, and being shown support by owner Elon Musk. It’s a new low for a platform that has seemingly abandoned the fight against hate speech.On Thursday, a number of accounts began tweeting #BanTheADL, calling on Musk to remove the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) from the site. The ADL is a civil rights organization focused on combating antisemitism and extremism. Momentum for the action seems to have been stirred by a meeting earlier in the week between the ADL’s national director, Jonathan Greenblatt, and Linda Yaccarino, in which the pair discussed how to curb the hate and toxic propaganda that have flourished on X ever since Musk’s takeover last year.But unless I’ve overlooked it, the only other articles I found about this were published in Israel. From the Jerusalem Post:… Elon Musk is engaging with white nationalists and antisemites who want to ban the Anti-Defamation League from Twitter, the influential social media platform he now calls “X.” Musk on Saturday asked his followers whether he should poll the platform about a hashtag, #BanTheADL, embraced in recent days by white nationalists and others on the far right. Musk had earlier “liked” the tweet launching the hashtag by Keith Woods, an Irish white nationalist and self-described “raging antisemite.” …Musk liked two subsequent tweets by Woods, who touted Musk’s support to his followers. The hashtag was widely embraced on twitter by the far right, including by Andrew Torba, a Christian nationalist who refuses to speak with Jewish reporters and who founded Gab, a social media site, as a redoubt for the far right after Twitter started banning extremists. The shooter who killed 11 Jews at prayer in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 broadcast hours plans on Gab before the attack.From Haaretz: Following a 72-hour social media storm of antisemitic conspiracy theories and attacks on the Anti-Defamation League, alarms sound on Elon Musk’s platforming of hate speech under the guise of free speech.Except alarms aren’t sounding. Rolling Stone and The Forward seem to be the only publications in the US that wrote about it, unless I’m missing them. (If I am, please let me know.) In other words, only one publication that isn’t explicitly oriented to the concerns of Jews thought this newsworthy at all. From The Forward: Since Musk bought Twitter in 2022, the platform, which he rebranded as X, has reinstated thousands of accounts that had been banned for promoting hate speech, including O’Brien’s, Kanye West’s and Donald Trump’s. Musk himself has made and amplified a variety of disturbing comments related to Jews, including quotes from Nazis and friendly public exchanges with bigots. They helpfully compiled these “disturbing comments” in another article. They also wrote, in another article, Elon Musk is the most dangerous antisemite in America. That article is important, because as I’ve realized from discussing this with my father, if you don’t use Twitter, you don’t realize how big Elon Musk’s vuvuzela is, or what it means when he signals approval to other users by liking, responding, or retweeting their comments. In fact, the words “liking, responding, and retweeting” probably mean nothing to you. As it happens, only 25 percent of the US population uses Twitter, so that’s probably many of my readers.1 Here’s what happens: When Musk calls attention to someone that way, he makes them famous, immediately. It directs a human tidal wave of attention—some 140 million Elon Musk fans—to their accounts. When he calls attention to these loathsome radical losers, they suddenly garner more attention than they ever have before in their pathetic lives and ever otherwise would. Usually, Musk doesn’t explicitly endorse the most outrageously antisemitic thing the outrageous antisemite has said. He likes or retweets or responds to something that, taken independently, is just ambiguous enough that it might be hard to construe it as antisemitic if you were, for example, an irretrievable imbecile. But Musk has turned all of Twitter into a giant engine for knowing what Musk is thinking, at all times. It’s inescapable. This means that every time Musk “likes” an antisemitic account, or replies, “concerning!” to one of its lunatic claims, some 140 million aimless, vague, discontented young men learn all about this fascinating theory that Jews secretly rule the world. Now, some of them live in countries where they’ve heard this all before, of course. Some of them have even heard it all befo...