A huge flurry of late recognition (better than never) has landed in the news. Elon Musk’s extremism, long documented on this blog and elsewhere including NPR, is finally being formally acknowledged by regulators.
You may recall Abu Hamza was successfully charged two decades ago in the UK with “intent to stir up racial hatred”. Now read this:
GIFCT’s 30 or so members have a shared database of current terror content that they collectively identify and automatically remove. It appears, though, that X is not contributing to the database or removing its terror content. Researchers at the CST were, within ten minutes, able to find on X propaganda videos from Hamas, Hizbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which are proscribed organisations.
Elon Musk is being called out as a publisher of terror content with intent to stir up racial hatred, NOT a platform owner.
Musk told advertisers to “Go F**k Yorself” and then threatened to sue them if they left him, indicating a dictator mentality completely divorced from accountability. Many now seem to be asking very loudly how soon he will face arrest and extradition.
The market simply isn’t strong enough to self-regulate such egregious criminal activity from a CEO.
In a WhatsApp messages seen by City A.M. between staff at one of the world’s largest ad buying agencies, one exec wrote: “[The lawsuit] coupled with Elon’s comments on recent riots… how any brand can even contemplate going near it is insanity.” Tait added: “Existing concerns that UK advertisers have about the platform are also likely to be increased by role X / Twitter is thought to have played in the unrest we’ve seen over the last week.”
The role Twitter played after it rebranded as a swastika? It was intent to stir up racial hatred, as we could see coming plainly for at least a year now if not three.
Nobody should want to be standing around or advertising at an Abu Hamza event, so surely they can’t be expected to have an account on Swastika aka X aka Twitter.
And as much as it’s impressive to see The Independent run a headline on how to delete a Twitter account, we already know it’s not nearly enough.
The time is approaching where we’ve got to all examine whether we should, en masse, withdraw from it and for there to be a different platform.
Germans prominently have been announcing their departure from Twitter, the Danish too… and even Australians, yet the UK seems to have ignored the threat far too long.
To be fair at the start of this year The Telegraph had raised a flag that Twitter was an intentional publisher of racist hate.
Yvette Cooper hits out at Elon Musk’s management of X. Shadow home secretary says social media company is being used to ‘promote anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim hate’
And the BBC at the same time quoted Ani Aluko when she called Twitter a place where Elon Musk will “vomit hatred unchecked“.
The bottom line: even if everyone flees X, the largest hate rally in history, that alone won’t stop the incitement disinformation it’s spreading now, let alone prevent the predictable violent attacks that follow.
What would the UK have done if Abu Hamza had been in charge of Twitter?