For the past several days, Elon Musk has been engaging in a very strange feud with a leading Jewish anti-hate group.
In a series of posts on X (the site formerly known as Twitter), Musk repeatedly blamed the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for a 60 percent decline in the site’s revenue — alleging a coordinated effort by the group, which monitors extremism, to push advertisers away from Twitter after Musk purchased it last year.
“Since the acquisition, The ADL has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic,” Musk wrote. “To clear our platform’s name on the matter of anti-Semitism, it looks like we have no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League … oh the irony!”
One should take Musk’s threats against the ADL about as seriously as his proposal for a cage match against Mark Zuckerberg.
The group has criticized Twitter for its permissive content moderation policies, but the legal standard for defamation is dauntingly high. There’s no good evidence that the ADL or any other nonprofit is largely responsible for X/Twitter’s ad woes, which mostly have been caused by its owner’s erratic behavior. Though Twitter recently filed a suit against a different group that tracks online bigotry, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk also has a very, very long history of empty promises. The vow to sue the ADL should be slotted into that category until proven otherwise.
What’s interesting about Musk’s threats is not that they’re likely to come to fruition; it’s what they tell us about the world’s richest man.
In recent months, Musk has repeatedly engaged with antisemitic accounts on his site and even flirted with outright antisemitism in his own statements. His specific false criticisms of the ADL, that a high-profile Jewish group is “primarily” responsible for Twitter/X’s business problems, evoke a long history of antisemites using Jews as scapegoats. His…
Read the full article here