This summer time, Netanyahu smoothed issues over in a dialog with Musk after the X proprietor repeated antisemitic tropes about Jewish financier George Soros. Netanyahu’s authorities minister tasked with preventing antisemitism made from level of claiming that Musk’s feedback weren’t antisemitic, regardless of widespread outcry in Israel.
The newest disaster — one in all many within the drama-filled 11 months since Musk purchased the corporate then generally known as Twitter — was sparked by a Sept. 4 tweet through which Musk accused a outstanding Jewish group of “attempting to kill” the platform with false accusations of antisemitism. Since then, Musk has issued more than a dozen tweets essential of the Anti-Defamation League, saying the 110-year-old human rights group was largely liable for a 60 % drop in promoting income and that he was planning to sue the group.
Because the disaster has ballooned, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and different Jewish enterprise leaders have stepped in to dealer peace, whereas X CEO Linda Yaccarino has gone into injury management mode.
Although Musk’s tweet caught Yaccarino and different executives off guard, leaders at X had been contemplating suing the ADL over what they believed have been misrepresentations of the extent of hate speech on the platform.
Yaccarino has since sprung into motion: writing a weblog submit and exchanging textual content messages with ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, with whom she met over videoconference a number of days earlier than Musk’s Sept. 4 tweet. The second might show to be an early take a look at of the connection between the erratic billionaire and his handpicked CEO, who was employed to placate advertisers and now finds herself cleansing up a number of the injury finished by her boss.
“X opposes antisemitism in all its varieties,” Yaccarino tweeted on Sept. 8. “Antisemitism is evil and X will at all times work to struggle it on our platform.”
Musk didn’t reply to a request for remark for this story, and X referred additional inquiries to Yaccarino’s public statements.
The Netanyahu assembly, which is being unexpectedly deliberate for this coming Monday and is anticipated to incorporate different tech leaders, provides a world dimension to the controversy, mentioned one of many individuals accustomed to the assembly. The Israeli prime minister, who’s dealing with a home disaster over his efforts to revamp Israel’s judicial system, has positioned his relationship with Silicon Valley leaders like Musk as necessary for the way forward for the “start-up nation” of Israel.
Promoting specialists informed The Washington Submit that the allegation that ADL is liable for X’s falling income was laughable. They mentioned that, for months, main advertisers have stopped spending on the service. The drop in demand resulted in far decrease advert costs for the advertisers that remained. A free advert credit score program X created to lure manufacturers again seems to have run out, they added.
“It’s clear Twitter’s drop-off in advert income began months in the past because of adjustments the platform made to advert codecs,” mentioned Sara Livingston, a advertising and marketing analytics guide. “It has nothing to do with the ADL.”
One other promoting govt, who spoke on the situation of anonymity to explain business conversations, mentioned there’s been a 75 % drop-off within the quantity of people that click on on advertisements since Musk’s acquisition of the corporate. The individual mentioned that the ADL had not been pressuring advertisers to cease spending on the platform currently.
A brand new biography of Musk by creator Walter Isaacson particulars his rage at requires an advertiser boycott in his first weeks of possession, after the ADL and different advocacy teams reported a surge in hate speech on the platform. However it additionally makes clear that lots of the firm’s issues with advertisers stemmed straight from Musk’s personal actions, resembling when he amplified a wild conspiracy theory on Oct. 30 about Paul Pelosi, the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), then the Home speaker.
In a subsequent assembly meant to reassure advertisers, Isaacson reviews, Musk inadvertently alienated them additional by saying they need to anticipate him to tweet silly issues typically. Maybe the largest blow to Twitter’s relationship with advertisers got here when the corporate’s new paid verification system allowed a bevy of trolls to impersonate major brands resembling Eli Lilly and Coca-Cola and ship offensive tweets of their title.
Within the roughly 100 days since Musk employed her, Yaccarino has labored to deliver advertisers again into the fold. She’s held conferences with high-profile advert executives. She’s spearheaded efforts to create new instruments that block their advertisements from popping up alongside problematic key phrases, and he or she contracted a third-party agency to ensure these instruments labored. The options went dwell final month.
She additionally met with outstanding civil and human rights teams which have criticized the platform for a spike in hate speech since Musk took over. In March, an analysis by British think tanks Institute for Strategic Dialogue and CASM Know-how discovered antisemitic posts had “greater than doubled” after the acquisition.
On Aug. 30, Yaccarino had a digital assembly with Greenblatt. The Jewish human rights group had beforehand been one of many organizations main a call for advertisers to boycott the platform in response to rising numbers of hateful posts.
Either side considered the assembly as cordial and productive, in keeping with the individuals briefed on the assembly, with Greenblatt and Yaccarino praising the dialogue in separate tweets.
However information of the dialogue rapidly introduced out far-right personalities on the platform. Charlie Kirk, who runs the right-wing nonprofit Turning Level USA, together with extremists resembling white supremacist Nick Fuentes, started boosting a hashtag, #BanTheADL. Fuentes even known as on his followers to make it pattern.
Musk himself started liking posts containing the hashtag. Two days later, he replied to an anti-ADL tweet from Keith Woods, an antisemitic YouTube persona who was a speaker at a white supremacist convention the earlier month.
Quickly, #BanTheADL grew to become one of many top trending matters on X.
Then, on Sept. 4, Musk tweeted that the ADL has been attempting to kill the platform by falsely accusing “it & me of being anti-Semitic.” He mentioned he had “no alternative” however to sue the group.
In an interview, Greenblatt mentioned that his group was accustomed to being on the receiving finish of hateful assaults. However Musk’s actions took the vitriol to a different degree.
“We’ve gotten bomb threats. Our workplaces have been swatted. None of that’s new,” he mentioned. “However this was an onslaught. There was one thing totally different about this tsunami of hate.”
He mentioned his group had not actively promoted the advertiser boycott in current months.
Amid the disaster, rich Jewish leaders tried to assist defuse the scenario, in keeping with two individuals accustomed to the matter who spoke on the situation of anonymity to explain personal conversations. Lonsdale, who co-founded the tech firm Palantir and is a pal of Musk, and Steve Rattner, an investor who manages former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg’s property, reached out to ADL.
“He doesn’t hate Jews, however he’s a fighter and once you punch him, he’s going to punch again,” mentioned one of many individuals accustomed to the outreach. “A part of who he’s is an aggressive drive of nature. He doesn’t perceive the second-order results.”
What Greenblatt didn’t know throughout his assembly with Yaccarino was that, behind the scenes, she and different executives had been working with Musk to plan for a possible lawsuit towards his group. The proposed lawsuit, which has not been filed, would dispute the methodologies utilized by the ADL and different advocacy teams as proof that incorrect, hateful and violent posts have surged on X, in keeping with one of many individuals accustomed to the plans. It will make allegations much like these in a lawsuit the company filed last month towards one other advocacy group, the Heart for Countering Digital Hate. The nonprofit’s CEO, Imran Ahmed, mentioned he additionally met privately with Yaccarino, simply weeks earlier than Musk sued the group over its analysis into hate speech on the platform.
Whereas X executives blame the ADL specifically for the promoting boycott, quite a few civil rights and advocacy teams had been a part of the marketing campaign, together with GLAAD, Media Issues for America, Free Press, Accountable Tech and Coloration of Change. They used the hashtag #StopToxicTwitter.
The burgeoning controversy is just not the primary in Musk’s relationship with the ADL. In November, shortly after he closed his buy of Twitter, Musk met via Zoom with Greenblatt and representatives of a number of different human rights organizations, together with the NAACP, Free Press, and The Asian American Basis. He pledged then that Twitter would proceed to discourage hate speech on the positioning. However he confronted fierce backlash amongst many on the suitable, who had supported his takeover of the positioning and favored his pledge to advertise free speech.
Shortly after, greater than 60 organizations signed a letter to Twitter’s high advertisers asking them to stop spending on the social media web site.
It was unclear Thursday what would possibly come of the Musk-Netanyahu assembly. Individuals accustomed to the occasion mentioned it was nonetheless coming collectively. Offir Gutelzon, an Israeli tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who has led efforts by Israeli expatriates to protest Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, mentioned he deliberate to arrange a rally within the neighborhood of the Musk assembly.
“It’s deeply disturbing that Benjamin Netanyahu, chief of the world’s solely Jewish state, is flying throughout America to hunt the counsel and help from a infamous enabler of anti-Jewish hate speech,” he mentioned.
Cristiano Lima and Drew Harwell contributed to this report.
