Twitter under Musk must not become hate speech haven, campaigner warns
The Antisemitism Policy Trust says there are two antisemitic tweets for every Jew in the UK per year
Elon Musk’s leadership of Twitter will be “paradoxical at best” if he allows unmonitored hateful content to spread on the platform, a key campaigner against antisemitism has warned.
Danny Stone, the Antisemitism Policy Trust’s chief executive, said there were “approximately two antisemitic tweets for every Jew in the UK per year” and people seeking to do harm online were excited about the new ownership.
Musk, the tech entrepreneur who has 85 million followers on the platform, agreed this week to pay nearly £35 billion to buy Twitter outright.
He said he hopes to turn it into a haven where all speech is allowed.
Stone said that while the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive was right to defend free speech, “if that means Twitter returns to being a hate platform on which diversity of opinion is crowded out through bad actors spreading toxic bile, then his position will be paradoxical at best.”
He added: “I hope that Mr Musk will make it abundantly clear that the learning Twitter has developed over many years in relation to its hateful content policies will not be lost, that its counter-hate policies will be strong and consistently enforced and that it will not become a haven for racists to deploy harm against minority communities.”
Musk has himself courted controversy on the platform, having previously compared the Canadian prime minister to Hitler and referred to a diver working to rescue boys trapped in a Thai cave as a “pedo” — short for paedophile.
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