This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1451753
Antisemitism On Twitter Has More Than Doubled Since Elon Musk Took Over The Platform, Research Finds
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1451753
2 Likes
Should anyone be surprised a Wealthy Prep school prick from South Africa who lived during apartheid allows this to go on. Wish we could deport him.
10 Likes
This asshole again?
7 Likes
Antisemitic tweets directed at Jewish investor and philanthropist George Soros warranted its own category. He was mentioned more than any other person in our data, over 19,000 times, with tweets claiming he was a member of a hidden globalist, Jewish or “Nazi” world order.
The media spectacle surrounding Musk’s takeover, along with his very vocal views on free speech, likely also encouraged exactly those people to join or rejoin the platform who had fallen foul of its previous attempts to confront hate. Our research gives some backing to this theory. Some 3,855 accounts we identified as posting at least one plausibly antisemitic tweet joined Twitter in the 10 days after Musk took over. This is, however, only a small proportion of the 146,516 accounts that sent at least one antisemitic tweet over the course of the entire study.
Unban antisemites, get more antisemitic tweets.
This was all predictable and predicted. The only question is whether Elon will do anything to change it. My prediction is no.
6 Likes
Isn’t it clear by now: Elon Musk is a vicious and exceedingly powerful racist, homophobe and anti-Semite. A low life like the bigoted filth he intentionally brought back to Twitter: Trump(a human fecal waste product), Ye(scum), Fuentes(a proud racist and anti-Semite). Musk is rapidly joining Trump in the toilet and sewer. I wish I could just flush all these stinkers into the waste stream where they belong. This would not only be “good for the Jews”, it would benefit America and everyone on our planet.
5 Likes
“No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.” ― Elie Wiesel
5 Likes
And when George Soros dies, I wish him good health, who will be the next George Soros?
To get someone worked up they have to have a focus to fixate on. So who will inherit Soros’ mantle of “fixer of all things I hate”?
7 Likes
Water Is Wet, Research Finds.
4 Likes
FoxNews will need a new Emmanuel Goldstein for its nightly two-hour hate.
3 Likes
Why can’t they deport people like him? I’d like to see them revoke his citizenship as I would Murdoch.
The H1-B visa Musk got was contingent on him getting a degree after getting his undergrad degree here, which I understand he never did. So, he lied. Actually, he’s lied about a lot of things. But y’know…male, white, privileged. Same old, same old.
9 Likes
Twitter seems to be populated by more and more trolls and bots. It has lost so much of its former usefulness that I don’t check it or engage with it like I used to. But then, Elmo doesn’t care because I am not of his people. Unfortunately I live only an hour or so away from his new empire in Austin.
3 Likes
Death didn’t end Hugo Chavez’ “reign” as a Leftist power-broker in MAGA circles, so why would they give Soros a break just because he passed on?
4 Likes
So the “hidden globalist world order” is both Jewish AND Nazi?
dou·ble·think
/ˈdəbəlˌTHiNGk/
noun
The acceptance of or mental capacity to accept contrary opinions or beliefs at the same time, especially as a result of political indoctrination.
Orwell was an optimist.
7 Likes
I don’t know the details, but supposedly Soros was coerced as a child to help the Nazis in some way (when he had zero agency as a young Jewish boy trapped in their totalitarian regime), and of course Putin has “justified” his war on Ukraine by accusing Zelensky (who is also Jewish) of leading a “Nazi” regime. So somehow these two disparate and unsubstantiated “facts” define an entire secret globalist order.
But they aren’t really even as sophisticated as Orwell gave them credit. They aren’t accepting contrary opinions or beliefs into their minds, since that would require them to actually understand the words they are using. They are more clearly using the Humpty Dumpty mode, wherein words mean precisely what they want them to mean, thus bypassing the need to have a single coherent thought, let alone two conflicting ones.
2 Likes
The pretext for the accusations stems from two childhood incidents that occurred after the Nazis invaded Soros’s native Hungary in 1944. The first took place when the Jewish council in Budapest, which had been established by Hitler’s henchman Adolf Eichmann, ordered Soros—then 13—and other Jewish teenagers to work as couriers delivering messages to Jews. As Soros has recounted many times, he showed an envelope he had been given to his father, Tivadar, who, upon opening it, realized it was a summons that would likely lead to internment. Soros warned the recipients not to obey the summonses.
The second incident occurred after Tivadar secured Christian identity papers for George and sent him to live with a Ministry of Agriculture official named Baumbach, who posed as his godfather. Baumbach wasn’t Jewish, but his wife, who was in hiding, was. Baumbach was assigned to make inventories of confiscated Jewish property, and according to journalist Michael T. Kaufman’s 2002 book Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire , he brought George along on a work trip to the country estate of Baron Móric Kornfeld, a wealthy Jew who had left his possessions behind in exchange for permission to leave the country with his family. While Baumbach worked, the teenager walked around the estate and chatted with the staff, hoping that no one would realize he was Jewish.
In short, Soros and his family did what was needed for him to survive as a Jew in Nazi occupied Hungary. Any implication that he was a Nazi collaborator is a malicious lie, often pushed by people who have anti-Semitic views themselves.
6 Likes
On a related note. I live in northern rural New Hampshire where there are lots of houses with huge Trump billboards and rows of Trump flags and very few people of obvious Jewish heritage. As an older White guy without an obviously Jewish surname I get to hear what my neighbors, barmates, etc. say when they think they’re “safe”. The level of racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism among these folks has grown exponentially since Trump came along. Though I had very rarely heard overt anti-Semitic comments before that piece of garbage came along, now not a week goes by that I don’t hear slurs and overt anti-Semitic comments. Several folks I always thought were “salt of the earth” types have over the last few years become Q conspiracy nuts and radicalized.
Given Trump’s clear contribution to bigotry in America and given his proud declared supporters’ roles in the most violent anti-Semitic acts in North American history(Tree of Life synagogue massacre), I find it unbelievably and sadly shocking that so many Hasidic and other ultra-orthodox and a smattering of wealthy but still greedy Jews adore Trump as if he were God.
PS: But still thinking about an hour after writing the above, the real core of Trumpism/MAGA is absolutely racism. Which is strange as there’s only one black family around here, always treated well and never the target of the ugliness as far as I know.
2 Likes
“Before Oct. 27, antisemitic tweets received an average of 6.4 “favorites” and 1.2 retweets. Since then, they have averaged 6 “favorites” and 1 retweet.”
So, let me get this straight. When Twitter’s old anti-hate measures were in place, engagement with anti-semetic tweets was marginally higher than it has been since Musk took over? That means that whatever Musk is doing now to reduce anti-semetic engagement is marginally better or, at worst, equally effective as what Twitter was doing before? And this, in spite the fact that the base visibility of anti-semetic tweets could theoretically double with the doubling of the incidences of such tweets?
Not a strong argument in support of a lot of the conclusions in the comments.
But I may be biased. Global warming is my #1 political concern and no one is doing more on that front than Tesla. Musk deserves a lot of credit for that. Hopefully, he comes back from the dark side.
Hitler didn’t need Twitter to create the Holocaust.
Perhaps the writer would do better studying why Antisemitism still persists in society rather than wasting time blaming a social media app and its current “villain-of-the-moment” Billionaire owner.
TWITTER. MUST. DIE.
When you gonna cancel your accounts, TPM? hehe
Everyone pretending it’s some sort of important bastion of free speech that they need to remain dependent on and attached to so that it someday wins out over the filth…or who are just saying that’s their motivation to cover for their baser motivation to stay there for profit reasons…
