#bantheadl — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

Grégory Gutierez 🌻🎸🐧 @[email protected] · 2023-10-09 · 06:57 UTC

“In August, a hashtag campaign pushed by right-wing ideologues and rife with antisemitic content began to trend on X, and was shown support by owner Musk. As a number of accounts began tweeting #BanTheADL, they called on Musk to remove the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — a civil rights organization focused on combating antisemitism and extremism — from the site.”

#ElonMusk Deletes Tweet Telling People to Follow #Antisemitic Account for War Updates
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-musk-israel-hamas-war-misinformation-twitter-1234848927/

#antisemitic #elonmusk #bantheadl

mathewingram.com/work @[email protected] · 2023-09-07 · 12:47 UTC

When Elon Musk first expressed interest in buying Twitter (now known as X) last year, a number of observers (including us) wondered what the world’s richest man could possibly want with an unprofitable social-media platform. Musk said that his interest in Twitter was driven in part by a desire to turn the platform—which he called the world’s “de facto town square”—into a bastion of free speech, and that he would see it as a victory if commenters from both the left and the right felt uncomfortable there. After his acquisition was finally completed in October, however, most of the changes Musk made seemed to favor the right. By December, the Atlantic tech writer Charlie Warzel had concluded that Musk had become a “far-right activist.”

Last week, we learned a little more about Musk’s motivations for buying Twitter when the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from a new biography of Musk by Walter Isaacson, a former president of CNN and the author of a number of biographies, perhaps most notably of Steve Jobs. (The book will be released next week.) In April 2022, Isaacson reports, things were going well for Musk; shares of Tesla, his electric-vehicle company, had increased in value by about fifteen times in five years, and SpaceX, his other company, was also doing well. “It promised to be a glorious year, if only Musk could leave well enough alone,” Isaacson writes. “But that was not in his nature.” Instead, Musk’s nature was to behave impulsively. Per Isaacson, Musk decided to take over Twitter because it was “an addictive playground” and owning it would make him “king of the school yard.”

Musk told Isaacson that there was another aspect to his desire to acquire Twitter: his concern that American society had become infected with a “woke mind virus,” which he characterized as a “fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general” belief system. Unless it was stopped, he said, civilization would “never become multiplanetary.” According to Isaacson, Musk’s concern was triggered in part by Jenna, his eldest child, transitioning to a different gender and cutting off all contact with him. Jenna “went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” Musk told Isaacson. He blamed her private school.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Once the idea of the woke mind virus got into his head, Musk saw it everywhere. Isaacson describes how Musk railed against Twitter’s cozy atmosphere when he toured the company’s headquarters, making fun of staffers’ “Stay Woke” T-shirts and the gender-neutral bathrooms. Since then, Musk has reserved some of his strongest criticism for entities that he believes have helped broaden the reach of the woke ideology. One of those entities is the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, a nonprofit that says that its mission is to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.”

This past weekend, Musk alleged in a series of posts that the ADL had pressured advertisers to remove their ads from X, and that this was the primary reason that the company’s US ad revenue was down 60 percent since he acquired the company. “They almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter,” Musk wrote. He went on to allege that the ADL would not relent unless he agreed to “secretly suspend or shadowban any account they don’t like”; that the ADL had the same relationship with Twitter before he acquired it; and that, “presumably,” they have a similar relationship with “all western search or social media orgs.” Musk concluded that the ADL was likely responsible for destroying 10 percent of X’s value, a figure he pegged at about forty billion dollars. He would have no choice, he said, but to file a defamation lawsuit (though, at time of writing, he had yet to do so).

According to a report from Rolling Stone, last Thursday, the hashtag #BanTheADL started trending on X, driven in part by a meeting between Jonathan Greenblatt, the organization’s national director, and Linda Yaccarino, X’s CEO. (Greenblatt described the meeting as “frank and productive.”) Those who worked hardest to amplify the hashtag, according to Rolling Stone, included Keith Woods, whom the magazine described as an Irish YouTuber with connections to prominent white supremacists, and Andrew Torba, the chief executive of Gab, a platform popular among right-wingers and neo-Nazis. At one point, Musk liked a post in which Woods alleged that the ADL is “blackmailing social media companies into removing free speech on their platform,” and replied with a post of his own alleging that the ADL was doing its best to kill X.

In Musk’s attacks on the ADL, many users of X saw a thinly veiled anti-Semitism. This week, in an open letter to Yaccarino, Claire Berlinski, an author and historian, called Musk “the most dangerous anti-Semite in America,” and the #BanTheADL campaign “one of the most vile public outpourings of antisemitism in American history.” By promoting it, Berlinski argued that X not only gave the accounts in question freedom of speech, but “extraordinary reach,” and that Musk personally bears responsibility for this.

Musk’s enmity toward the ADL, it should be noted, didn’t start with the hashtag campaign. As far back as last year, Greenblatt condemned Musk’s decision to reinstate Donald Trump’s account, which had been suspended after the former president incited the January 6 riot in Washington. In May, Musk, echoing an anti-Semitic trope, tweeted that George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist, “hates humanity”—a comment that the ADL criticized strongly; the same month, the ADL published a report finding that anti-Semitism on X increased dramatically following Musk’s acquisition of the platform. (The organization collected more than five thousand examples of anti-Semitic commentary in February, from more than two thousand accounts.) Per Rolling Stone, Musk and Greenblatt also clashed in August, after Musk claimed that there has been a “genocide of white people” in his native South Africa; Greenblatt said that there was no evidence to support this claim, leading Musk to respond with two exclamation marks. According to some recent tweets using the #BanTheADL hashtag, some of the group’s critics now see it as an “anti-white hate group.”

Nor is the ADL the only supposedly “woke” institution or pressure group that Musk has gone after. During his tweetstorm about the ADL, Musk also claimed that Meta had “caved to far left pressure groups and now allows them to silently dictate policy in exchange for ad money.” This appeared to be a reference to the #StopHateForProfit ad boycott, which was organized by a number of nonprofit organizations, including, in addition to the ADL, the NAACP, Free Press, Common Sense Media, Color of Change, and a group known as Sleeping Giants, which pressures websites and media companies to stop running advertisements from Breitbart and other conservative entities. According to Politico, that hashtag campaign led to more than eight hundred companies pulling their ads from Facebook.

Even if Musk ends up suing the ADL—which some observers, including The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg, view as highly unlikely—it wouldn’t be the first time that he has sued a nonprofit group that fights hate speech. Just last month, X filed a lawsuit against a nonprofit called the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a group that published a report finding that X failed to take down 99 percent of the hate speech posted by users who pay for the X Premium service (a subscription plan that includes a blue checkmark); the report also suggested that X’s algorithm effectively boosts “toxic tweets.” In the lawsuit, X accused the CCDH of illegally accessing data and cherry-picking posts to show a rise in hate speech, and blamed that group, too, for hitting the platform’s advertising revenue. (Jem Bartholomew of Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism spoke with Imran Ahmed, the executive director of the CCDH, about the lawsuit.)

Whatever Musk thinks about the “woke mind virus,” the available evidence suggests that he is desperately searching for scapegoats on whom he can blame the death spiral of a platform whose acquisition, as Isaacson reports, was not clearly thought through. Mike Rothschild, a disinformation researcher, perhaps put it best this week when he scoffed at the implication that “erratic management, mass layoffs, incoherent moderation… serial unbanning of racists, and crumbling infrastructure had nothing to do with twitter losing half its value.” But Musk’s enabling and promotion of campaigns like #BanTheADL is clearly fomenting hatred. And, as Rosenberg put it, Musk seems to see the “abuse of Jews on his site” as “the consequence of Jews complaining about the abuse.”

https://mathewingram.blog/2023/09/07/elon-musk-looks-for-someone-to-blame-for-twitters-decline-and-this-week-its-the-adl/

#bantheadl #stophateforprofit

The Secret Life Of Plants🌱 @[email protected] · 2023-09-06 · 14:03 UTC

Elon Musk 'likes' trending #BanTheADL posts as white supremacist ad runs on platform | Mashable
https://mashable.com/article/x-twitter-elon-musk-white-supremacist-ad-ban-adl-hashtag

#bantheadl

Jeremy (יעקב) 🇺🇦 @[email protected] · 2023-09-06 · 02:46 UTC

CW: Twitter

New blog post is up. An easy reference for non-antisemites who still have concerns about the ADL right now but are not antisemitic.

Happy to add to it as needed.

https://acapeella.wixsite.com/blog/post/answers-to-non-antisemitic-concerns-about-the-adl

#ADL #BanTheADL #antisemitism #USPolitics #USPol #Musk #Elon #ElonMusk #Twitter #X

#adl #bantheadl #antisemitism #uspolitics #uspol #musk

Christine Hall @[email protected] · 2023-09-05 · 19:26 UTC

"In the midst of all of this, Musk egged on a silly, idiot-driven campaign to #BanTheADL, which he can do if he wants, but kinda puts the exclamation point on how Musk’s conception of “free speech” is driven by his own personal views, not any kind of principled stance."

On Monday, he started talking about suing the ADL for defamation (a claim he found hilarious in his own mind, given that the organization’s own name is the anti-defamation league).
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/05/hey-elon-the-adl-convincing-advertisers-to-run-away-from-your-site-is-part-of-the-free-speech-you-pretend-to-support/

#bantheadl

That Would Be Telling @[email protected] · 2023-09-05 · 14:21 UTC

“A #BanTheADL began circulating on the social media platform after a meeting last Thursday between ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and X’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino.”

Looks like it went so badly Musk is talking about suing them, mentioning anywhere from $4-22 billion in damages. Let me add to my first edit that this is also the type of hardball negotiating which Musk is known for on occasion.

Also on the table is extending his “not buying a company, but buying evidence” as in exposing the ADL’s previous actions and current demands, like WRT to Libs of TikTok which is conveniently run by a Jew.

As a reminder, the ADL said they’d work with ElonTwitter X but instead started an advertiser boycott. He mentioned how non-Western advertising revenue did not take a hit unlike the 60% the US did, Europe also way down was mentioned but without numbers (based on a new EU law that just went into effect X might have to withdraw from it).

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/no-choice-musk-threatens-suit-against-adl-blames-activists-most-xs-revenue-loss

#bantheadl

Grégory Gutierez 🌻🎸🐧 @[email protected] · 2023-09-05 · 12:46 UTC

"Plusieurs figures de l’extrême droite américaine – dont certains, comme le militant suprémaciste Nick Fuentes, ont longtemps été bannis de Twitter avant que M. Musk rétablisse leurs comptes – ont lancé le mot-clé « #bantheADL » : « Interdisez l’ADL ». M. Musk en personne a répondu et « liké » plusieurs messages de cette campagne anti-ADL publiés par Keith Woods, un youtubeur antisémite proche du militant suprémaciste Richard Spencer."

https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2023/09/05/twitter-elon-musk-annonce-porter-plainte-contre-la-principale-organisation-de-lutte-contre-l-antisemitisme_6187918_4408996.html

#bantheadl

Masayuki Hatta @[email protected] · 2023-09-04 · 17:30 UTC

Elon Musk 'likes' trending #BanTheADL posts as white supremacist ad runs on platform https://mashable.com/article/x-twitter-elon-musk-white-supremacist-ad-ban-adl-hashtag

#bantheadl

White House Press Office @[email protected] · 2023-09-04 · 00:27 UTC

I find it deeply troubling that the #BanTheADL hashtag has been trending over the past 24 hours. We must continue to strive for a society free of hatred and bigotry, and this kind of hateful rhetoric has no place in our society. #NoHate #NoBigotry #LoveNotHate #StandAgainstHate #EndHateSpeech http://www.techmeme.com/230903/p9#a230903p9

#endhatespeech #standagainsthate #lovenothate #nobigotry #nohate #bantheadl

White House Press Office @[email protected] · 2023-09-04 · 00:27 UTC

I find it deeply troubling that the #BanTheADL hashtag has been trending over the past 24 hours. We must continue to strive for a society free of hatred and bigotry, and this kind of hateful rhetoric has no place in our society. #NoHate #NoBigotry #LoveNotHate #StandAgainstHate #EndHateSpeech http://www.techmeme.com/230903/p9#a230903p9

#bantheadl #nohate #nobigotry #lovenothate #standagainsthate #endhatespeech

nedhamson @[email protected] · 2023-09-04 · 00:02 UTC

Elon Musk ‘likes’ trending #BanTheADL posts as white supremacist ad runs on platform | Mashable

Anti-Semitic posts are rising on the former Twitter as Elon Musk signals support for #BanTheADL hashtag. — Read on mashable.com/article/x-twitter-elon-musk-white-supremacist-ad-ban-adl-hashtag

http://nedhamsonsecondlineviewofthenews.com/2023/09/03/elon-musk-likes-trending-bantheadl-posts-as-white-supremacist-ad-runs-on-platform-mashable/

#bantheadl

Techmeme @[email protected] · 2023-09-03 · 23:55 UTC

After ADL's CEO noted talking to X CEO Yaccarino last week, anti-Semitic X posts surged and #BanTheADL trended as Elon Musk replied to and liked far-right posts (Matt Binder/Mashable)

https://mashable.com/article/x-twitter-elon-musk-white-supremacist-ad-ban-adl-hashtag
http://www.techmeme.com/230903/p9#a230903p9

#bantheadl

Jonathan @[email protected] · 2023-09-03 · 12:29 UTC

Elon Musk 'likes' trending #BanTheADL posts as white supremacist ad runs on platform

https://mashable.com/article/x-twitter-elon-musk-white-supremacist-ad-ban-adl-hashtag

#bantheadl

Farhad @[email protected] · 2023-09-03 · 00:06 UTC

Rolling Stone magazine has accused Elon #Musk of supporting "antisemitic propaganda" for "amplifying" the trending "#BanTheADL" hashtag on X, formerly known as #Twitter.

#antisemitism #USPolitics

#twitter #uspolitics #antisemitism #musk #bantheadl

Lesley Aeschliman @[email protected] · 2023-09-02 · 23:50 UTC

CW: re: Twitter/X: Musk ponders Twitter poll about banning the Anti-Defamation League from the site

@Rob299 Apparently, the ADL had a meeting with Linda Yaccarino about the hate on Twitter/X. Right-wing accounts got mad about it and started tweeting the "#BanTheADL" hashtag. This caught Elon's attention, hence why he's proposing the poll.

#bantheadl

Sæmundr Sigfússon @[email protected] · 2023-09-02 · 05:48 UTC

Elon Musk is going full Nazi - 'likes' trending #BanTheADL posts as white supremacist ad runs on platform https://mashable.com/article/x-twitter-elon-musk-white-supremacist-ad-ban-adl-hashtag

#bantheadl