Elon Musk encouraged extremists and white supremacists throughout his year-long stint as owner of X, formerly Twitter, but this week he still managed to push the boundaries of behavior that ordinary users — and advertisers — will tolerate.
On Wednesday, Musk endorsed a post from User X accusing Jewish communities of spreading “polemical hatred against white people.” The statement itself was a response to a different X post sharing a PSA video from the Foundation Against Antisemitism along with criticism of anonymous users posting “Hitler was right” online.
“I am not at all interested in giving the slightest bit now about the Western Jewish population coming to the alarming realization that those hordes of minorities that… [they supported] “The floods in their country they don’t like very much,” User X wrote in response. “You want the truth to be told to your face, here it is.”
“I told the truth,” Musk replied.
Musk went out of his way to praise the protest in kind White nationalist conspiracy theory He was adopted by the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter, Robert Bowers. Minutes before the shooting, Bowers posted on the far-right social media site Gab that the American Jewish nonprofit HIAS, which provides aid to refugees, “loves bringing in invaders who kill our people.” “I cannot sit back and watch my people be slaughtered,” Powers wrote moments before 11 people were killed in a Pittsburgh synagogue.
The comment by X’s owner and CTO is attracting increasingly widespread condemnation. On Friday, White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates He responded to Musk’s recent endorsement of white supremacy on his own platform.
“We condemn this abhorrent promotion of racist and anti-Semitic hatred in the strongest terms, which runs counter to our fundamental values as Americans,” Bates said, citing the Tree of Life tragedy and the deadly attack by Hamas in Israel on October 7. “A responsibility to bring people together against hate, and a commitment to speaking out against anyone who attacks the dignity of their fellow Americans and puts the safety of our communities at risk.”
The fallout from Musk’s support for racist and anti-Semitic conspiracies spread further on Friday afternoon, with… Apple announces a “temporary pause” On all company advertisements on X.
The tweet, which Musk described as “actual truth,” also resonated more widely Great replacement Conspiracy theory, promoted by white nationalists to sow fear that non-white people will displace majority white populations in countries such as the United States
Malik X has dealt with anti-Semitic figures before. Musk previously welcomed Kanye West to X after the musician was banned on Instagram after invoking anti-Semitic tropes. Less than a day later, West infamously tweeted his intention to “go to die.” [sic] con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE” and later published a Star of David combined with a swastika. X suspended West’s account in December but reinstated it over the summer.
A year ago, Musk reinstated a number of accounts previously suspended for spreading hate, including notorious neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, who created the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer. Upon his return, Anglin delved into the new Twitter rules in response to Musk: “You got suspended for 12 hours for tweeting a Star of David with a swastika inside… Whatever the rules are, people will follow them. We just need to know what the rules are.” “.
Musk has made a habit of dealing with avowed white nationalists and other hate figures on X. In September, Musk liked a tweet from someone. He described himself as an “angry anti-Semite” who began a campaign to ban the Anti-Defamation League from X. Musk accused the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights organization, of being “the biggest generator of anti-Semitism on this platform” and He threatened to sue the group Due to the loss of advertising revenue from its criticism of the rise in hate speech on X under his leadership.
Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook, offered some sarcasm comment About the situation at Threads, a competitor to Meta’s “How will you handle this difficult, but morally unambiguous, situation?”