Elon Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur who owns X (formerly Twitter), posted on the social network on Nov. 17: “At risk of stating the obvious, anyone advocating the genocide of *any* group will be suspended from this platform.”
He did not respond to a comment from New York Post reporter Jon Levine, asking if Twitter would suspend Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who posted that “from the river to the sea” is an “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction or hate.”
He did reply to someone who asked about Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, writing: “We have a ‘United Nations’ rule that exempts senior government officials who are recognized by the U.N. from suspension in the interests of maintaining international communications.”
Also on Friday, Musk wrote that “‘decolonization,’ ‘from the river to the sea’ and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide. Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension.”
The new posts garnered praise from Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “This is an important and welcome move by Elon Musk,” Greenblatt wrote. “I appreciate this leadership in fighting hate.”
Two days beforehand, Musk struck a somewhat different note.
A user with a relatively small following accused Jewish communities of promoting the same “dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them” and expressed disinterest in “Western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.”
“You have said the actual truth,” Musk responded. In a subsequent post, he added that “the ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel. This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat.”
Greenblatt responded to Musk’s post about “the actual truth” the following day.
“At a time when antisemitism is exploding in America and surging around the world, it is indisputably dangerous to use one’s influence to validate and promote antisemitic theories,” he wrote.
