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Elon Musk Takes Aim at the ADL - The New York Times [1]

['David Austin Walsh']

Date: 2023-09-11

Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men who is now most famous for running the website X, formerly known as Twitter, has a new excuse for the company’s shaky performance since he bought it last year. The problem, according to Mr. Musk, is the Jews.

In an outburst on his platform on Monday, Mr. Musk claimed — without presenting any evidence — that ad revenues on Twitter are down 60 percent “primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL”— the Anti-Defamation League — which he said “has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.”

While the website has long had a reputation as a cesspool for lies, hate speech and a significant neo-Nazi user base, under a former chief executive officer, Jack Dorsey, Twitter had begun to take steps to ban the most provocative and openly racist and antisemitic users. A 2018 report by the ADL noted that 4.2 million antisemitic tweets had been shared or re-shared on the platform in the previous year, before Twitter’s ban on extremist accounts took effect. Mr. Musk largely reversed those policies under the aegis of free speech. Thanks to the reinstatement of extremist accounts — and a new algorithm which prioritizes posts from “verified” users who have forked over $8 a month to the company — X/Twitter now functions as a bullhorn for the most toxic elements of the white nationalist right.

Mr. Musk also blamed a collapse in the company’s value — estimates place the company’s current worth at roughly one-third the $44 billion Mr. Musk paid for it — on the ADL, saying that he was considering legal action against the ADL and signaling that he supported banning the organization from X.

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/elon-musk-adl.html

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