Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of X, has threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League for defamation, saying that the nonprofit organization’s claims concerning increased hate speech on the social media platform have harmed X’s advertising revenue.
Musk said on X, previously Twitter, that US advertising revenue is “still down 60%, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!”
Musk also stated that since taking over the site in October 2022, the ADL “has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.”
“It appears that we will have no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League to clear our platform’s name on the issue of anti-Semitism… oh the irony!” he remarked.
The ADL stated that it does not comment on legal threats as a matter of policy. The organization did, however, state that it recently met with X leadership, including CEO Linda Yaccarino, whom Musk hired to help resuscitate ad income. Following the meeting last week, Yaccarino congratulated ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, writing on X, “A strong and productive partnership is built on good intentions and candor.”
Meanwhile, the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, has recently liked and commented on a number of postings condemning the group.
The ADL accused Musk of “lifting” a #BanTheADL campaign that had flourished on X.
“Antisemites, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, and other trolls have launched a coordinated attack on our organization,” the ADL said. “This is not a new occurrence,” an ADL official said.
The ADL and other similar organizations, such as the Center for Countering Digital Hate, have discovered that under Musk’s leadership, the level of hate speech on the website has increased considerably.
In one case, the CCDH discovered that under Musk, daily use of the n-word is quadruple the 2022 average, and slurs against homosexual men and trans people are up 58% and 62%, respectively. In a second analysis, the ADL stated that its data reveals “both an increase in antisemitic content on the platform and a decrease in the moderation of antisemitic posts.”
Musk called the two watchdog groups’ reports in May “utterly false,” claiming that “hate speech impressions,” or the number of times a tweet containing hate speech has been viewed, “continue to decline” since his early days as a company owner, when the platform saw a spike in hate speech designed to test Musk’s tolerance.
Nonetheless, two firms suspended their ad expenditure on X last month after their adverts aired alongside an account supporting Nazism. After the issue was reported, X suspended the account and stated that ad impressions on the page were modest.
Musk sued the CCDH last month, accusing the organization of attempting to drive advertisers away from the platform by publishing studies critical of the network’s response to hateful speech.
It alleges that CCDH violated the platform’s terms of service and federal hacking statutes by scraping data from the company’s platform and encouraged an unnamed individual to inappropriately gather Twitter information that it had sent to a third-party brand monitoring supplier.
CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed previously told CNN that much of the complaint, including the claim about the anonymous individual, “sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory to me.”
“The truth is that he’s [Elon Musk] been casting around for a reason to blame us for his own failings as a CEO,” Ahmed said, “because we all know that when he took over, he put up the bat signal to racists and misogynists, homophobes and antisemites, saying ‘Twitter is now a free-speech platform.’ And now he’s startled that people can measure the increase in hate and disinformation that has resulted.”
