"Twitter, or X as its controversial owner Elon Musk recently renamed it, is a particularly toxic cesspool of unbridled racism and harassment, where antisemitism has pride of place," writes FSWC President and CEO Michael Levitt in his latest column in the Toronto Star, delving into rising antisemitic content on the X platform, particularly since Elon Musk took over the company, and the importance of holding social media giants to account for allowing hate to fester.

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What is it about social media that brings out the worst in so many people? What prompts countless users of these digital platforms to shamelessly spew pure, unadulterated hate speech against all manner of minorities and other targets? While social media may not create vile content, it clearly facilitates and amplifies it.

Twitter, or X as its controversial owner Elon Musk recently renamed it, is a particularly toxic cesspool of unbridled racism and harassment, where antisemitism has pride of place. It will take a lot more than a rebranding to rid the platform of its endemic Jew-hate whose numbers are staggering.

Restoring musician Kanye West’s account — as Musk just did — after suspending it last year due to the rapper’s blatantly antisemitic tweets to his 31 million followers, won’t exactly help.

As a founding member of the Inter-Parliamentary Task Force to Combat Online Antisemitism, a multi-partisan, international group established in 2020, I’ve long been appalled by both the volume of antisemitism on the X platform and the company’s feeble efforts to address the problem. While respecting the sanctity of free speech, I and fellow members of the task force have called on social media companies to be more transparent about their internal moderation of content.

The purveyors of antisemitic tropes, memes, conspiracy theories and other vile rhetoric on the X platform are numerous, prolific and often crafty in their pejorative references to Jews.

“Antisemites on the platform have resorted to all kinds of coded tricks to elude Twitter’s now limited hate speech detection,” PJ Grisar wrote last week in The Forward.

In studying the period from June 2022 to February 2023, researchers from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and CASM Technology found nearly 326,000 English-language antisemitic tweets. Since Musk took over the company last October, antisemitic tweets have increased dramatically. In the three months following Musk’s purchase, compared to the three months before, the weekly average number of antisemitic tweets more than doubled, from 6,204 to 12,762.

Continue reading in the Toronto Star

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