![]() What is being done to the ADL on Twitter right now has little to do with the group’s conduct and everything to do with the symbolic role Jews play in the conspiratorial imagination. Anti-Semites love to blame Jews for whatever problems they personally perceive in the world. As Musk himself has said, “advertisers avoid controversy,” and he has been a one-man wrecking crew when it comes to Twitter’s-sorry, X’s-reputation.īut though the ADL is not the cause of Twitter’s continuing unprofitability, it is a convenient culprit on which to pin the platform’s many failures. It’s hard to keep brands and users on your platform when you keep making it worse. Musk has also abandoned the company’s iconic name and logo, fired much of the site’s content-moderation team, throttled its direct-messaging capability, replaced its free TweetDeck service with an inferior paid version, and repeatedly engaged conspiracy theorists and bigots on the site, most recently the self-described “raging anti-Semite” and unapologetic white nationalist who popularized #BanTheADL. ![]() By allowing users to pay to prioritize their replies, Musk enabled trolls and scammers to dominate the discourse with low-quality contributions that would previously have failed to gain traction. The social-media site was already in terrible shape when the entrepreneur acquired it, shedding power users and overrun by bad actors, and the new owner has done little to reverse its trajectory. In reality, Twitter’s cratering valuation is the fault of a far more obvious offender: Musk himself. Musk is not shy about this motive behind his missives: The ADL “would potentially be on the hook for destroying half the value of the company, so roughly $22 billion.” This is not a rational critique of the ADL’s advocacy it is an irrational attempt to blame the Jewish group for Twitter’s failings. (Chronology does not appear to be his strong suit.) Musk later insinuated that organizations like the ADL may be “complicit” in covertly creating the bigoted accounts they criticize. Abuse of Jews on his site, he argued, is the consequence of Jews complaining about the abuse. “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 anti-Semitism on this platform,” Musk wrote yesterday. Far from offering a considered critique of the organization, the bombastic billionaire has instead circulated cartoonish conspiracy theories about it. ![]() This is readily apparent from Musk’s own tweets on the matter, which have amplified the anti-ADL attacks to millions of readers. But none of this is what is driving the current consternation on Twitter. On the right, politically conservative Jews have long taken issue with the ADL’s more progressive stances. I’ve written critically about some of its well-meaning but misguided social-media-moderation efforts, and am to the group’s left on questions of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Like any organization, the ADL is not above reproach. But in practice, as even a cursory glance at #BanTheADL’s many bigoted boosters reveals, the viral vilification is not about anything the ADL has done it’s about whom the group represents. Ostensibly, the campaign is a response to the ADL’s persistent public pressure on Twitter to remove bigotry from its platform, on the grounds that the organization’s activism is censorious and causing advertisers to abandon the site. Over the past several days, hundreds of thousands of posts on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, have assailed the Anti-Defamation League, the premier Jewish civil-rights organization, under the hashtag #BanTheADL. But for Elon Musk and countless users on Twitter, it was an opportunity to denounce a Jewish organization as the source of their sorrows. For most people, Labor Day weekend was a time for rest and relaxation with friends and family.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |