Musk threatens to sue ADL after blaming it for X ad sales slump
axios.com
axios.com
https://jweekly.com/2000/05/12/judge-fines-adl-10-5-million-...
"On April 28 [2000], the jury found most of the charges leveled by the ADL, based on the tapes, to be 'not substantially true.'"
“It was just a joke” smh
“ In various conversations, the Quigleys refer to attaching images of oven doors to the Aronsons' house, of burning their children and of wishing their Jewish neighbors had been blown up in a terrorist attack in Israel.”
"Have you ever seen a microservice drink a glass of water, Mandrake?"
Sounds like something he ought to be able to substantiate pretty simply, so why not do so?
I normally hesitate any comparisons between Musk and Trump but the lack of self reflection and baseless threats of legal action are a real commonality. He surely knows he’d have no leg to stand on but still wants to drum up some drama.
_Because it is nonsense_, come on, we all know this.
Isn't that exactly what he's going to do if he sues the ADL? Or where did you expect him to substantiate it first? Seems a bit strange to accuse him of not doing what he just started doing.
Why do you presume that? Even if that’s the case, why wouldn’t he say that?
If he gets discovery against the ADL then he can see how widespread it is using things like internal documents too, and build the case directly with that, instead of having to go via whatever scraps other businesses will give him.
"Elon Musk comes around to blaming the Jews" as a headline.
Yep this will work really well :).
The suing? Nah, that's probably not it. But blaming "the Jews" because your advertising revenue is down? Eh, it's gets a little more questionable at that point. In isolation, maybe not. But come...on...given past behavior and everything else going on with xitter, you're willing to give benefit of the doubt? I'm not. My ears might not be what they used to be (thanks, rock n' roll!), but I can still hear dog whistles.
... collecting biometric and employment history on every user.
... uh oh!
> We are confident that the vast majority of American tourists will avoid a country whose reputation is associated with Nazism, even if that association is not justified.
The NBC News article quotes Jews and Muslims living in Iceland at the time of the proposal.
The NYT article notes that even the Roman Catholic church was opposed to the proposal.
Personally, I only follow things I like on Twitter which means I don't see any hate speech. It's hard for me to anecdotally say if things have changed. But it's not hard to imagine that chronically-online groups who have hate for Elon and his companies would try to crumble his social network because they don't agree with his approach.
This feels like a really slippery slope. Hard to weigh in honestly.
> some of the tech world has put in significant effort to silence conservatives
That doesn’t strike me as a neutral statement! What does “conservatives” mean in this context? Always reminds me of this tweet:
—-
Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
Con: LOL no...no not those views
Me: So....deregulation?
Con: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Con: Oh, you know the ones
https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
for example, if someone is banned for saying “death to non-whites”, theres a pretty good chance they’re being banned for advocating genocide, not because they’re conservative.
or if someone was banned for denying that covid was real, they weren’t banned for “conservative views”. whether we agree with the reasoning or not, they were banned for denying covid when the sites had made clear this topic would result in a ban.
i’ll repeat what i’ve said many times before. this idea that banning is somehow new, or is some creepy definition of censorship is nonsense. site owners and moderators have had rules for their online spaces since the beginnings. and just like real world spaces, people get removed constantly. it’s not new. it’s not weird. it’s not shocking.
I think you will find that people have been getting banned for rather less harsh statements, like "maybe Covid was man-made", "Hunter Biden is corrupt", and "men cannot be women."
It's true, but that would be within Twitter and Meta's rights. The real issue was that they did so at the behest of the incoming administration, in behind-the-scenes meetings. It's the involvement of government officials that may have broken laws and trampled the First Amendment. Also egregious and painful to see was that they shadow-banned accounts rather than banning them outright.
But I don't see how that has anything to do with a private, non-government advocacy group making their feelings known to advertisers. It happens all the time. Conservative groups call to boycott Budweiser, liberal groups call to boycott Chik-fil-A. It's not illegal.
However, it's effective as a stunt for Elon, because saying that a Jewish advocacy group has the power to shut down his business implies, as subtext, the unspoken bit about Jews controlling the world. The statement and the choice of target leans on that implication. And the quote where he jokes that they're a defamation organization, as opposed to "anti-", reminds me of Sartre's quote which is worth repeating in full:
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
Definitely not. But if (not asserting this happened) the ADL threatened to defame as antisemitic any advertiser that didn't participate in a boycott, that could be illegal.
I don't believe there is any evidence for any of these claims. Rather the opposite: pro-freedom pro-business anti-regulation conservatives have been crying wolf for years now, demanding special meetings with tech companies, demanding special treatment, demanding government intervention, demanding that they be allowed to say anything without consequences.
Modern US conservatives are a minority. How big of a minority depends on how you draw the lines. Republican policy proposals are often (but not always) even more unpopular. Cognitive dissonance (or just good old fashioned politicking) demands some conservatives insist otherwise and see everything as some kind of suppression effort or conspiracy.
It's the whole "conservatism can't ever fail... it can only be failed" thing at work. Or the Simpsons Skinner meme: "Am I Out of Touch? No, it's the voters who are wrong!" If only the big mean tech companies weren't suppressing my clearly superior views everyone would agree with me. No... maybe your views are just way less popular than you think. Maybe instead of being shadow banned people just think you're an asshole.
Your belief is incorrect. To give one isolated example (out of many): https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-bowed-to-white-house-p...
> The discussion took place three months after Facebook, which is owned by Meta Platforms META -0.14%decrease; red down pointing triangle, decided to stop banning posts asserting that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured, in light of increasing debate about the virus’s origin.
if a free-speech “consequence free” absolutist were to berate their wife and call her disgusting every day, we could ask them how seriously anyone takes their “i have free speech” as she walks out the door with their kids.
> if a free-speech “consequence free” absolutist were to berate their wife and call her disgusting every day, we could ask them how seriously anyone takes their “i have free speech” as she walks out the door with their kids.
Of course! Both the insulted boss and battered wife have freedom of association. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association
It might be perfectly fine, but why should the target of this campaign- also a private entity- refrain from denouncing this and retaliating with bad publicity for the involved advocacy group? Twitter/ X lives off ad revenue, and the ADL lives off its reputation of a non-partisan organisation pursuing a laudable cause. If ADL can erode X's advertising revenue, I don't see why X shouldn't fight back by trying to weaken the ADL's reputation, as long as it is done in the open and by legal means.
And even assuming that from a risk standpoint X should rather comply to whatever the ADL demands; what is the effect of companies never fighting back purely because of risk aversion? Wouldn't this end up making the activist organisation less accountable and even encourage further demands?
In the meantime, the ADL has already threatened X with reputational damage, and now Musk is doing the same with the ADL- by spreading the idea that their motives are not necessarily laudable. I see a perfect symmetry in the situation.
> the reason I quoted Sartre in that post is that I believe there is no sincerity to this. Selecting a Jewish organization...
Basically what you're saying here is that your judgement of the situation is biased by the fact that the ADL is a Jewish organisation. Should Jewish organisations not be engaged directly or asked to be accountable for their actions?
As for the accountability, it seems obvious to me that if accusing a Jewish organisation of wrongdoing automatically exposes you to such a terrible suspicion as that of making antisemitic dogwhistles, then these organisations get free rein to say whatever they want because even challenging them produces an unacceptable reputational damage.
The critique in the article can be considered on its own. The fact that it comes to us via Elon Musk resharing Keith Woods, and not as an original link from Musk, tells us volumes about how Musk is willing to be publicly portrayed and who he appears to be listening to, which are also relevant information for the topic at hand.
>As for the accountability, it seems obvious to me that if accusing a Jewish organisation of wrongdoing automatically exposes you to such a terrible suspicion as that of making antisemitic dogwhistles, then these organisations get free rein to say whatever they want because even challenging them produces an unacceptable reputational damage.
I'm not sure how they are any less accountable than he is. If he wants to sue them, he can. There is nothing stopping that because the ADL is a Jewish organization. What accountability do you think there is aside from that? The ADL can't force anything to happen, they can just advocate for their side as he does.
You are being purposefully obtuse. Musk isn't being called an antisemite because he's singled-out the ADL, it's because he's amplified antisemitism and doesn't seem to care about it.
You're imagining a vast anti-Elon conspiracy (with no apparent motive), instead of the much more boring explanation that an organization that tries to combat antisemitism is upset at antisemitism.
[Background on the new leader of the ADL and some suspicious activity with Al Sharpton]
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/al-sharpton...
[A review of a documentary on anti-semitism that touches on political influence from the ADL]
https://www.npr.org/2009/11/24/120452232/exploring-the-polit...
[An article on how Facebook caved to leftist groups like the ADL]
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/07/03/activists-...
Either you are a public square and you gain protection from your users commenting but you can't delete or moderate their content (sans actual spam/child p/etc), or you can moderate/curate your users content but you are no longer protected/can be held liable for things your users post.
This worse of both worlds we have going on here results in these alphabet soup agencies/ngos having a place on the boardroom directly affecting people's speech.
Getting companies to not delete posts if they want to not be held liable for stuff their users posts helps prevent this issue.
>Getting companies to not delete posts if they want to not be held liable for stuff their users posts helps prevent this issue.
There's no circumstance here where twitter is being attempted to be made liable for their users posts, so what relevance is 230?
If you want to require private companies to publish your content, you have to overturn the first amendment, or at the very least, replace the current supreme court with one open to extreme "interpretation" of the text, but maybe don't then complain when they ban guns.
Or speech, for that matter. There's never a guarantee that an activist court rules in the way a person wants them to rule.
If you return to the “any effort to moderate lawful content at all gives you publisher-style liability over the whole service” rule that existed pre-230, you destroy all commercial UGC sites pretty quickly. Because flawless moderation at scale isn't possible, and the market for unmoderated sites is pretty limited. (Especially because either way you have to respond to reports of certain potentially unlawful content to avoid criminal liability, and that rule creates a huge risk that a slight error in that response suddenly opens you up to unlimited civil liability for other content.)
We know this because that was the emerging situation that Section 230 was the response to.
Musk is mad that advertisers don't like being seen next to posts calling for violence, and are using their first amendment right of free association to NOT associate with a platform with a lot of calls to violence.
In the real world when someone is a loud asshole people generally avoid them. They don't invite them to parties. They don't hang out with them. Online is no different. Communities overrun with loud assholes drive away normal users.
Again a real-world analogy: what you are proposing is that Starbucks, as a business that caters to the public, should not be allowed (by law) to eject or ban someone who comes in and starts screaming obscenities because they think it is funny. If they attempt to regulate the speech of patrons then Starbucks becomes directly liable for everything their patrons say. There are only two outcomes: Starbucks goes out of business because trolls show up and annoy people who don't want to hang out in a loud coffee shop with super annoying people who harass them... or Starbucks prohibits talking in their store to avoid liability.
I can also come up with many ways for bad faith actors to cause huge problems in your proposed scheme. Imagine a competing electric car maker paying shills to invade all the Tesla owner forums to get them shut down or harass everyone into leaving. Or imagine a rival political party doing the same. It isn't that difficult to create 100 bot accounts that flood every thread with non-spam posts that are nevertheless not useful content and not posted in good faith.
For that matter HN's posting policies would be prohibited under your own rules. It wouldn't take long for the usefulness of this site to disappear in that case.