Elon Musk’s Attacks Against The ADL Referenced In Now-Deleted X Ad

By Brian Bell  |  September 21, 2023 | 2:45pm
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Elon Musk’s Attacks Against The ADL Referenced In Now-Deleted X Ad

X, formerly known as Twitter, released a new advertisement Thursday morning promoting Elon Musk’s vision of the social media platform as a “global town square” while trying to convince users of its “everything app” plans by highlighting features that are already mostly available via an X Premium, formerly known as Twitter Blue, subscription.

An ad for a social media app including images of scrolling timelines and posts about cake isn’t surprising, but it can’t be that simple in the ongoing saga of Elon Musk’s ownership of the former home of tweets. The timeline scroll in the ad’s first few seconds featured a post highlighting Musk’s claims that the Anti-Defamation League is to blame for X’s decreased ad revenue and overall value since Musk bought the company for $44 billion last year.

The video, released via X CEO Linda Yaccarino’s official account, displayed a post from Right Wing Cope, an account that regularly highlights comically bad takes and hate speech from conservatives on the platform, that includes a screenshot of Musk’s Sept. 4 post claiming the ADL “would potentially be on the hook for destroying half the value” of X.

The ad also included posts critical of X’s timeline algorithm, highlighting Bill Maher’s lukewarm feelings on the joint WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike, a pornographic joke and references to holocaust denier Bobby Fischer.

The video has since been deleted and replaced with a new video, which Yaccarino claims is the same ad but in “higher res,” with the posts critical of Musk and X removed but the other posts intact. 

Musk’s post was part of a reply thread stemming from another post where he threatened to sue the ADl for defamation as a way “to clear our platform’s name on the matter of anti-Semitism.” Right Wing Cope cut through the dog-whistling in its response: “Twitter’s value has fallen by 50%, and Elon is blaming it all on the Jews. Masterful gambit sir.”

X’s owner hasn’t been shy in attacking organizations that criticize the rise in hate speech and relaxing of content moderation on the platform under his ownership. The company filed a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate in August alleging that the nonprofit created a “scare campaign” that impacted X’s advertising business.

Despite what Musk says, the prevalence of hate speech and the company’s continued inattention toward moderating is the more likely culprit for X’s crashing value (which we can only take Musk’s word for since the company is now privately owned). A CCDH report released last week sampled 300 posts from 100 X accounts containing hate speech that violated the platform’s hateful conduct policies that the organization reported to X moderators. The report specified that 259 of the 300 posts remained up and 90 of the 100 accounts were still active.

“Twitter/X is enabling dangerous content that could lead to real-life violence,” the CCDH report reads. “The longer Congress delays social media regulation, the longer people’s safety will be in the hands of greedy and unreliable billionaires.”

 
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