The Salem (Mass.) News on how maybe hitting Musk’s wallet will help:
When Elon Musk took over Twitter — now X — a little more than a year ago, there was concern the site would become riddled with conspiracy theorists, white supremacists and antisemitic hatemongers.
That concern has proven to be justified. One of Musk’s first moves was to reinstate the account of former fabulistin-chief Donald Trump, and things have ... gone downhill since then.
When he bought the site for some $44 billion last year, he referred to it as “the de facto public town square.” Increasingly, it’s becoming the public cesspool, a stoker of hate.
A report earlier this fall from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found the site routinely declined to remove hate speech, even after being given ... instances of its existence.
The organization collected 300 posts from 100 accounts that contained hateful content, and reported them using X’s user-reporting tools. About 140 of the posts contained antisemitic content, including some that used swastikas, others supporting Holocaust denial, and others promoting conspiracy theories related to Jews. Others stated Black people were intrinsically violent and urged people to stop “race mixing.”
When the group followed up a week later, according to its report, only 49 posts had been removed. A stunning 259 posts remained active, including one that referred to Adolph Hitler as “a hero who will help secure a future for white children.”
Things have only gotten worse since the group published its report and war broke out in Gaza after the attack on Israel by the terrorist group Hamas.
“The platform has become a hotbed of misinformation and terrorist propaganda” since the Oct. 7 attack, said a group of 27 Democratic lawmakers . ...
The lawmakers noted X has allowed the posting of numerous videos from Hamas, a terrorist organization . ...
Meanwhile, anti-muslim hate speech on X jumped 422% on Oct. 7 and Oct. 8 and rose 297% over the next week, according to the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue . ...
Already, giant advertisers such as Disney and Apple+ have paused their advertising on the site, after finding their brands running side-by-side with hate speech.
Musk’s response... has been to sue the organizations that pointed out the racist, antisemitic and anti-muslim posts in the first place, and X’s seeming acceptance of their existence.
Those suits are frivolous at best. The First Amendment guarantees free speech. It doesn’t guarantee an audience for that speech. Here’s hoping more companies follow the lead of Apple+ and Disney. If common decency can’t cause Musk to act, maybe financial risk can.