Elon Musk And Anti-Semitism

Racism, and more specifically anti-Semitism, are not confined to the UK and its free and fearless press: the disease is equally, if not more, virulent in the USA, and within that country’s own media class. Accusations of anti-Semitism, and the consequences following from it, have caused ructions around Twitter, X, or whatever Muskrat is calling it this week.

So much so that Musk has now told his 163 million followers “The split second court opens on Monday, X Corp will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company”. A real bear with sore head moment. Who’s he suing? “Their board, their donors, their network of dark money, all of them”. Why so?

Ah well. A Tweeter had posted “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realisation that these hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much. You want the truth said to your face, there it is”.

And it would have gone no further than the odd murmur about batshit conspiracy theories, except that Musk intervened to reply “You have said the actual truth”. It got worse: his absolutist approach to free speech, or his interpretation of it, added to that endorsement, spooked advertisers.

Kyle Griffin of MSNBC had an early example: “IBM says it has ‘zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination’ and has ‘immediately suspended’ all advertising on X following a report that the platform ran IBM ads alongside pro-Nazi material”. FREEZE PEACH can also mean lost ad revenue.

CEO Linda Yaccarino of Twitter/X/Whatever tried to push back. But by now, Media Matters was on the case, and their Senior Fellow Matthew Gertz reminded her “Ma'am, your boss is describing posts that reference ‘hordes of minorities’ as ‘the actual truth’ and criticizing ‘Jewish communities’ for promoting ‘hatred towards whites.’” The ad losses were not confined to IBM.

MMFA’s CEO Angelo Carusone had the bad news that “Apple just announced they're pulling their ads from from X/Twitter [which] is very significant for 3 reasons: 1) X needs the App Store. It's very hard/nearly impossible for Apple to fairly enforce App Store rules when they're one of biggest advertisers. Now the conflict is gone”. His other two reasons were even worse news.

“2) Apple was a very big spender (one of top advertisers) and even more relevant was one of few companies that increased spend over the past year … 3) X/Twitter would often point to Apple's presence as evidence that the platform was brand safe. It's going to a lot harder for them to slow the advertiser losses without Apple's presence to point to”. OUCH!

And as Musk dug himself in deeper by frothing “Many of the largest advertisers are the greatest oppressors of your right to free speech”, Matt Binder had even worse news: “you can now add … Disney … Paramount … Warner Bros to this list of companies that just suspended advertising on X / Twitter after Musk’s recent endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory”.

Not long after Rupert Murdoch claimed that all the Egyptians he had met were white, and complained about the “Jewish-owned press”, someone prevailed upon him to put the Twitter feed down. Musk should have done the same a long time ago. Alternatively, he could have listened to his colleagues and discovered that his views were, shall we say, not quite mainstream.

As has been pointed out, “Henry Ford. Ezra Pound. Charles Lindbergh. Kanye West. Elon Musk. There’s no ‘genius’ that excuses this endless parade of toxic antisemitic nonsense”. Gertz has added better news for those of us besieged by Twitter adverts: “The good news is that at this rate, soon regular X users won’t have ads in their timeline either”. Still Musk refuses to listen.

You can’t sue your way out of a hole. But you can stop digging.

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