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Susan Young is the Bangor Daily News opinion editor.
I guess I should be glad that Elon Musk has stopped threatening to literally fight Mark Zuckerberg. But, his latest obsession is even more troubling.
Musk, one of the world’s most powerful businessmen, has blamed the financial woes of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, on — wait for it — the Jews.
According to Musk, the company’s loss of ad revenue isn’t due to his mismanagement of the company. Or to the foolish renaming of one of the world’s best known companies or the firing of many of its competent employees. Or the platform’s alarming rise in hate speech.
No, it’s because Jews, specifically the Anti-Defamation League, have spotlighted the platform’s embrace of hate speech, notably antisemitism. The group last fall asked companies to pause ads on the platform until the hate speech was addressed. Musk, this week, blamed the ADL for a 60 percent decline in ad revenue.
Rather than address the documented troubling rise in hate speech, Musk has attacked one target of this speech — a group that stands up for Jewish people. This is the typical ploy of attacking the messenger instead of listening to — and addressing — the message. Worse, it follows the dangerous trope of blaming Jews for the world’s problems. Think of the political right’s constant blame of George Soros and global elites for anything they don’t like.
Shortly after Musk bought Twitter in 2022, an analysis found an alarming rise in hate speech.
Slurs against Black American tripled in the weeks after Musk’s takeover. Slurs against gay men rose by more than 50 percent and antisemitic posts rose by more than 60 percent, according to an assessment by the ADL, the Center for Countering Digital Hate and others last fall.
Despite claims from Musk that the company has addressed these concerns, and that he is “against antisemitism of any kind,” recent reviews have found persistent and troubling levels of hate speech, particularly antisemitic speech.
I am not suggesting this one small example is a representative sample of the climate on the massive Twitterverse — now called the Xverse? — but here is my recent experience.
In mid-August, I wrote a column explaining why my hatred of Nazis is personal. My mother is a Holocaust survivor. My father served in the Army during World War II, crossing Europe and engaging in some of the war’s biggest anti-Nazi missions, including D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. Both of them were irrevocably harmed by Nazis and their vile propaganda.
When the column was posted on X, nearly every comment (and to be fair, there weren’t a lot of them) was negative, many of them suggesting that I hadn’t been critical of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, which weren’t even the topics of the column. Some unabashedly bemoaned that America was becoming less white and suggested this somehow was a big problem.
The fact that a couple dozen supposed people felt compelled to defend Nazis or engage in silly whataboutism seems like a troubling reflection of the platform to me.
Sure, Nazis apologists and deflectors have free speech rights and can have a say on social media. But when they dominate discussions, the algorithms feel wrong. When most Americans agree that Nazis are wrong, that their ideas are vile, why is a once-popular social media platform apparently so eager to share these views?
Rather than answering that question, Musk has resorted to a centuries-old trope — attacking one of the smallest religious and ethnic groups in the U.S. and the world, a group that is so small that it couldn’t control the world if it wanted to.
But why the Jews? Why have we been blamed, for centuries, for illnesses, economic hardships and any manner of bad times? Why is antisemitism the world’s oldest hatred?
To oversimplify, people need scapegoats. And Jews, a small group that has for centuries been portrayed (often by Christians) as outsiders, as different, have long been an easy target.
Jews make up a little more than 2 percent of the American population, but are the target of more than half the religious hate crimes in the U.S., according to Stand Up to Jewish Hate, a group founded by New England Patriots owner, and Jew, Robert Kraft.
“It’s going on constantly, and there’s no let up, and it makes me sad, actually,” Kraft said of the rise in antisemitic rhetoric in an interview with CBS News earlier this year. “This is the United States of America. I mean, it shouldn’t happen here.”
It shouldn’t happen here, but it is. Beyond being sad, we should be outraged. And we should stand up to Jewish hate, on X and anywhere we see it.