NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {E} lon Musk’s barrage against the Anti-Defamation League has divided much of social media into two camps — those who hate the billionaire and are rallying around the ADL, and those who hate the ADL and are rallying around Musk.
The reality is that there are valid reasons to criticize the ADL, a left-wing activist group that has become useless in combating antisemitism, but there are also reasons to take issue with Musk’s exaggerated assertions about the organization being somehow disproportionately responsible for financial losses at X (formerly Twitter), his social-media company.
For those who missed it, Musk has threatened to sue the activist group, claiming that its accusations of antisemitism against users of the platform have cost the company billions of dollars in advertising revenue.
No doubt, the ADL has not covered itself in glory in recent years, particularly since former Obama White House staffer Jonathan Greenblatt became its national director in 2015. Under his leadership, the ADL has drifted further away from being an organization geared seriously and specifically toward fighting antisemitism and devolved into just another left-wing activist group. The organization has often turned a blind eye to left-wing antisemitism, which has allowed it more room to fester and made the group’s criticisms of right-wing antisemitism appear politically motivated even when legitimate. The decline of the ADL from its original purpose has been documented at length by authors including Seth Mandel and Liel Leibovitz. These criticisms have come from people who care deeply about the issue of antisemitism and who are saddened that a group that is supposed to be the preeminent organization fighting it has become so incompetent during a period when hatred of Jews is on the rise.
Musk, by contrast, is not advancing reasoned, good-faith criticism of the ADL. Instead, in a series of posts, he pointed the finger at the ADL for his own business losses since taking over Twitter, which he renamed X. He has been arguing that the group’s pointing out antisemitism on the platform has caused advertisers to flee. In one post, he claimed, “In our case, [the ADL] would potentially be on the hook for destroying half the value of the company, so roughly $22 billion.”
Here, Musk is conflating the amount that he paid for the company with its actual value — even though at the time of his purchase, it was widely accepted that he drastically overpaid for the social-media company. In his offer letter to buy Twitter, he wrote, “I am offering to buy 100% of Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash, a 54% premium over the day before I began investing in Twitter and a 38% premium over the day before my investment was publicly announced.” After realizing his offer was too generous, he then spent months trying to back out of the deal, which sent the market valuation of the company down to about $25 billion by the time he had no plausible legal recourse but to go through with his acquisition.
Perhaps realizing that the $22 billion number was completely absurd, Musk then claimed, “Based on what we’ve heard from advertisers, ADL seems to be responsible for most of our revenue loss. Giving them maximum benefit of the doubt, I don’t see any scenario where they’re responsible for less than 10% of the value destruction, so ~$4 billion.”
He then wrote, “Advertisers avoid controversy, so all that is needed for ADL to crush our US & European ad revenue is to make unfounded accusations. They have much less power in Asia, so our ad revenue there is still strong. This ‘controversy’ causes advertisers to ‘pause’, but that pause is permanent until ADL gives the green light, which they will not do without us agreeing to secretly suspend or shadowban any account they don’t like.”
To be clear, there is plenty of antisemitism on X, as there is on other social-media platforms. As a Jewish writer, I have been subjected to it consistently — both before and after Musk’s takeover. It’s a genuine problem. But I have always been willing to put up with it because I believe in open speech, and, given the sheer volume of content, I don’t see how any platform can come up with a way of limiting “hate” and “misinformation” that does not also result in arbitrary and unjustified suppression of speech.
The ADL has clearly taken a different approach to speech on social media, but it is hardly the only left-wing activist group to do so. As an example of Musk’s odd obsession with the ADL, he says that days after he acquired Twitter, “ADL kicked off a massive Twitter boycott campaign.” It’s true that the ADL was part of an effort calling on advertisers to pause spending on Twitter, but it was one of many organizations doing so under the umbrella group Stop Hate for Profit.
According to the group’s website:
Stop Hate for Profit is a diverse and growing coalition that wants social media companies to take common-sense steps to address the rampant racism, disinformation and hate on its platform. It includes thousands of businesses, numerous prominent celebrities as well as some of the most prominent civil rights groups and nonprofit organizations in the country including ADL, Color of Change, Common Sense, Free Press, LULAC, Mozilla, NAACP, National Hispanic Media Center, and Sleeping Giants.
Since taking over the social-media company, Musk has been trying to have it both ways — claiming to be a champion of free speech while touting to advertisers the filtering out of unwelcome content. To woo defenders on the right, he has engaged with influential personalities, reinstated some prominent accounts, released secret emails revealing the suppression of speech under the previous ownership, and so on. At the same time, there are conservatives still getting suspended for arbitrary reasons, and his policy “freedom of speech, not reach” is just another way to describe the process of “shadowbanning,” in which content is allowed to be posted but is not widely seen by users if deemed to represent “hateful conduct.”
There’s no reason to believe that Musk himself hates Jews, and his war against the ADL may be just another performative action to burnish his credentials on the right as a champion of free speech. But there are plenty of bad actors who do hate Jews, and, by singling out the ADL as being especially responsible for suppressing free speech, he has stirred up a hornets’ nest. Those who see Jews as uniquely responsible for all the world’s ills are now pointing to Musk’s comments about the ADL as validation that, yes, in fact, Jews work behind the scenes in a sinister way, weaponizing false accusations of antisemitism to carry out their nefarious plots.