Antisemitism on X: Elon Musk goes 'thermonuclear'

Stand by for an almighty courtroom battle, said Benjamin Weingarten in the New York Post. 

Elon Musk last week filed what he called a "thermonuclear" defamation suit against Media Matters for America, a left-leaning non-profit organisation. The group had recently released a report alleging that X, formerly Twitter, runs adverts for Apple, IBM and other big companies next to "pro-Nazi content". 

The report prompted many of these firms to pull their ads from the platform. Musk, for his part, insists that Media Matters cynically manipulated X's algorithms to get a freak result. He claims that it created fake accounts to follow exclusively "fringe" content on the one hand and X's big advertisers on the other. And that it then repeatedly refreshed the accounts' timelines to generate 13-15 times more ads per hour than a normal X user would see, until it finally achieved the damning juxtaposition it was after.

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'X's safeguards are ineffective'

Musk claims this is cheating, said Greg Sargent in The Washington Post, but Media Matters didn't doctor any images. Its experiment showed that X's much-touted safeguards against such juxtapositions occurring are ineffective. To accuse it of foul play is, as critics have pointed out, like blaming a customer who posts about a cockroach in his salad for ordering too many salads.

Besides, companies might be less inclined to pull their ads from X if Musk weren't making "antisemitic utterances" of his own. Shortly before this row broke out, he had endorsed a post on X saying that Jewish people had been promoting "hatred against whites".

'Musk's no antisemite'

Musk showed poor judgement in endorsing that particular tweet, which clearly crossed a line, said Jack Posobiec on Human Events, but he's "no antisemite". His business partner, David Sacks, is Jewish, and Musk's other tweets make clear he's opposed to antisemitism.

The specific point Musk was attempting to make is one that mainstream conservative Jews have been making for years, said Mark Hemingway on RealClearPolitics: that some "liberal Jewish organisations have been supporting left-wing identity politics, causes and ideology that will eventually be turned against the Jewish community". It's Musk's opposition to woke ideology, and his belief in free speech, that really bothers liberal activists and that has made them so determined to "sully his name". Be in no doubt: more is at stake in the forthcoming Media Matters trial "than Elon Musk's bottom line".