Anti-Semitism Groups Fear the Worst About Spreading Hate on Twitter
Elon Musk tweeted a photo of a Wehrmacht soldier on Monday, the latest in a string of controversial posts from Twitter’s new CEO.
The photo, arranged as a meme and captioned “Three unread messages”, shows a Nazi soldier carrying a carrier pigeon cage strapped to his back during the Nazi invasion of France in 1940. In accompanying message, Elon Musk wrote: “How times have changed.”
In a later tweet in the same thread, the new Twitter CEO added, “Back when birds were real.”
No explanation was offered for this series of enigmatic tweets.
The messages were posted as Jewish groups in the United States urge the new owner of Twitter to do more to prevent hate speech from spreading on the social network.
Against the backdrop of Kanye West’s anti-Semitic posts, anti-Jewish content on Twitter is experiencing a “prolific surge”, according to the Network Contagion Research Institute, an organization that monitors the spread of hate and misinformation online. The institute thus noted on Friday that “terms associated with Jews are tweeted more than 5,000 times per hour” and that “the most engaged tweets are openly anti-Semitic”.
Severely criticizing Elon Musk’s new leadership, the Anti-Defamation League called on all advertisers to suspend their relationship with Twitter.
“We met with Elon Musk earlier this week to express our deep concerns about some of his plans, as well as the surge in toxic content since his acquisition,” the Stop Hate For Profit coalition, a group including the ADL, said in a statement. a press release on Friday. “Since then, hate and misinformation have proliferated to such proportions that we fear the worst is yet to come.”
These groups also tried to convince Elon Musk to stop retweeting conspiracy theories and problematic content. The entrepreneur previously tweeted, then deleted, a link to a conspiracy theory about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband’s home.
Presenting himself as an ardent defender of freedom of expression, Elon Musk is committed to allowing the broadest word to find an echo on the social network, suggesting that the moderation of content would be much more flexible than before. .