What Has Musk Learned When he Buys Twitter? Investigating How Antisemitic Hate Speech Explodes on Social Media

When billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter and pledged that “the bird is freed” last week, Felix Ndahinda saw a threat rising on the horizon.

Even so, Ndahinda believes that Musk would add to the anti-Semitic activities happening in the Great Lakes and beyond by reducing the oversight of social media posts. Ndahinda says a permissive culture where anything goes always increases the trends. The increase in virulence in hate speech will be encouraged by this.

The dean of global business at the school says that the toxicity of the site has gone up post- Musk’s arrival.

A study by the nonpartisan Institute for Strategic Dialogue and CASM Technology, an organization that researches online hate speech and disinformation, used machine-learning tools to sort through Twitter posts and identify those containing antisemitic language. From June 1 to October 27, 2022, the day Musk bought Twitter, it found 6,200 posts per week that qualified as antisemitic. A number of 12,700 was recorded from that day until February.

These platforms are usually where false narratives start. When those narratives creep onto mainstream platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, they explode. They go out of control because everybody is watching and covering them on social media.

James Piazza, who studies terrorism at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, is concerned about the people that use inflammatory speech on social media. “That’s the situation where you can have more violence.”

Twitter’s change of policy brings to an end years of relative transparency, but studying social media platforms and their impact on society has always been tricky, according to Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. The problem has always been centered around the curious position social platforms hold in society: They’re quasi-public utilities—the “de facto public town square” that Musk crowed about when he first launched his bid to buy the platform—but are privately owned.

Tromble expects that the Musk era at Twitter will begin with a period of chaos as Musk and Twitter users test the boundaries. Then, she says, it is likely to settle down into a system much like the Twitter of old.

Moskowitz told CNN that the comments he got on his account after the hearing proved his point that antisemitism is real.

The Democrats on the subpanel were able to grill the former executives of the company about their policies on hate on the platform. Moskowitz rebuked the former president for hosting a white nationalist at Mar-a-Lago. He brought a large copy of a hateful post that Fuentes had tweeted at Moskowitz, telling the room, “No, not all Republicans are Nazis, but I gotta tell you, Nazis seem really comfortable with Donald Trump. So I have questions about that.”

Moskowitz said it was because of his heightened concern that the Department of Homeland Security had issued domestic terror threats to the Jewish community. There is an “enduring threat” to the Jewish community and threat actors have recently Mobilized to Violence.

The ADL continues to flag antisemitic content on behalf of the company, but they only took action on a portion of them after Musk bought the company. He was worried about the staff cuts and the accounts that were banned previously.

On February 13, Twitter is expected to end free access to its API, or application programming interface, the backend access that lets people build bots to automatically post and respond to tweets on the site. Musk has said that a minimum of $100 a month is needed for access to the bot platform, in order to clean it up.

The risks involved make it hard for social networks to grant researchers access to their data. If an academic uses free access to a platform’s API to identify a massive issue with state-sponsored disinformation, or problems with content moderation that allow hate speech to fester unchecked, it could cause headaches for the site. The social media platforms choose to lock researchers out or place excessive prices on accessing the application programming interface, in lieu of allowing them to analyze their platforms. That dependence is an “intolerable situation for independent research,” says Lorenz-Spreen.

In the past few weeks alone, academic researchers have used free API access to track all activity on the platform in a 24-hour period, map how insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the US government on January 6, 2021 coordinated on the platform—and even estimate the proportion of users that are bots on the platform. This kind of research will now become much harder.

In the aftermath of Cambridge Analytica’s access to millions of users’ data, Facebook restricted access to its application programming interface.

A CNN Investigative Report on a Jewish Threat Threat to Kill the Jews in the U.S.: Jeremy Blackburn, the vice president of the iDRAMA Lab and a former CNN producer and correspondent

A lack of understanding about how academic funding works is the main problem according to Jeremy Blackburn, an assistant professor at Binghamton University and member of the iDRAMA Lab. “At worst it’s an attempt to grift more taxpayer money via federal funding agencies like he’s done with his other companies.”

Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a columnist for The Washington Post and a weekly opinion contributor to CNN. Her own views are expressed in this commentary. View more opinion on CNN.

In what should be a shocking bit of news even in a country where antisemitism, violence and wild conspiracy theories are becoming all-too common, a man was arrested for allegedly threatening to kill all the Jews in the Michigan government, the FBI said. The news, which was an important one for some outlets, including CNN, seemed to be downplayed by other major media organizations.

I was struck by the call to take the threats seriously because Nessel mentioned it on his account. She hoped the federal authorities took this offense just as seriously as the Hate Crimes & Domestic Terrorism units did when they plotted to murder officials.

Still, if the suspect has shown us the recipe for this toxic concoction, he has also revealed its antidote: pushing back against and removing as much as possible those same ingredients from our society.

What is wrong with Nigerian antisemites? The challenge facing the United States at the time of the 2016 November 11 congressional recess summit

The account is still up, at the moment of this writing, despite its crumbling safeguards. A trail of anger, threats and accusations are shown against Jews.

Public safety agencies need to do a better job of identifying, reporting and protecting against hate crimes, including antisemitism. To do that, they need a commonly accepted definition of antisemitism. The International Holocaust Remembrance Association, an intergovernmental association to which the US belongs, has a concise definition:

One of the country’s most notorious antisemites hosted at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in November. Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the ADL, said that the problem of antisemitism is going to be normalized.

Trump claimed he didn’t know who Nick Fuentes was, and was only expecting Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. Ye was already a celebrity antisemites with a flurry of posts on social media, which caused a wave of antisemitic incidents, according to the ADL.

The nation has a serious challenge. Countering the threat will require people across society to refute these unfounded ideas, help safeguard the people who are targeted and call out those who promote their unhinged notions.

That’s why it was disappointing when the agenda for a recent House Democratic Caucus retreat included talks about defending Asian Americans and the LGBTQ community against hate crimes and other attacks, but somehow forgot about the minority that comprises by far the largest percentage of religion-based hate crimes, even when the statistics excluded some of the cities with the greatest numbers of Jews.

Something started changing in the United States a few years ago. One could almost taste the air of hostility that started wafting across the country. Social media is awash with prejudice that may have been expressed in the past. Conspiracy theories can now be heard on major networks. The people who promote hate can now eat with the powerful. And violence is on the rise.

There is something rotten in America, where is it coming from? Is it from irresponsible social media platforms chasing profits, from partisan “news” networks with little respect for the truth or from politicians seeking to bolster their electoral chances?

They started climbing in 2016, when the political atmosphere shifted; when extremists started feeling empowered to chant “Jews will not replace us;” when a new president defended them and conspiracy theorists started expanding their audience. The country’s polarization went into full gear. But there is more to the story, and that is only part of it.

The Holocaust Is Coming: Antisemitism, Hate, and the Violations of the Declaration of Independence in the United States

The researchers tried getting a comment from the social media giant, but they received an email with a picture of a poop. Musk sent the same response after he found an explosion of racist messages after he bought the platform.

The number of Americans who believe anti-Jewish conspiracy theories is exploding, doubling in the past couple of years to reach a 30-year high, according to an ADL survey released in January.

Students everywhere should learn about the Holocaust. There is evidence that young people do not know basic facts about it, and most states don’t require it. That should change. Six million Jews were murdered in the middle of Europe during the Second World War, and young people must be aware of that.

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Both political parties, Republicans and Democrats, must do a more forthright job of calling out antisemitism in their midst. No party is immune from it, from the bizarre rantings about “Jewish space lasers,” to the offensive claims saying support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins.”

It’s also time for Congress to tackle the jungle of hatred that has grown on social media. The platforms’ owners and leaders have a responsibility to not allow them to become recruiting grounds for extremists. That now-largely-shirked ethical responsibility must become a legal one, with penalties attached for negligence.

Last December, President Joe Biden established an interagency group to develop a national strategy to combat antisemitism. That was a very important move. But government cannot do it all.

Everyone has a part to play in making sure hatred does not feel safe. The United States is in danger of being poisoned by hostility that has been causing it to reject prejudice.