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How Elon Musk Spent Labor Day Weekend and Why It Matters.
weekend attacking ADL and engaging with some of the once-banned antisemitic users he allowed back on the platform in order to do it.
If you were offline and missed it, Media Matters has a rundown of what happened. But the tl;dr version is that Musk is big mad because ADL has repeatedly pointed out that since Musk’s purchase of Twitter (I refuse to call it X), antisemitism on the platform has increased. Now, ADL is hardly the only organization to show this in its research, but ADL is a well-resourced, longstanding institution with a lengthy record of corporate accountability wins.
But perhaps more relevant here, ADL is a frequent target of the far-right, especially online. Musk is always seeking attention and engagement from far-right reactionaries on Twitter. What better way to get approval from those folks than to threaten to sue the ADL and then boost antisemitic posts about the organization on your own account?
Musk coming for ADL is part of a larger trend — attacks on researchers who study disinformation and hate speech on the tech platforms. One of the Right’s strategies is to attack the credibility of these researchers, what they produce, and the institutions where they work. Republicans in Congress, led by Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, are using their majority in the House to harass researchers and institutions. Officially the Judiciary Committee has opened an “investigation” into whether universities, think tanks, and organizations that do research into social media colluded with the US government to suppress right-wing speech. But as there’s not one shred of evidence that this happened, the demands for documents and testimony amount to a form of harassment designed to intimidate the targets of their “investigation.”
#TheTwitterFiles was Musk’s own contribution to this strategy. Together Musk and Jordan have created a kind of weird echo chamber of powerful individuals, the Chair of a powerful Congressional committee and the owner of a tech platform, leveraging powerful institutions to spread conspiracies and disinformation. They amplify one another’s conspiratorial content, and Jordan’s “investigation” seems to come directly from the conspiracies and disinformation “reported” on in #TheTwitterfiles. Musk is especially helpful to Jim…
