Elon Musk
Elon Musk vows legal action as major advertisers desert X over anti-Semitic post
Elon Musk has vowed to file ‘thermonuclear lawsuit’ as major advertisers desert X/Twitter after tycoon agreed with anti-Semitic post.
Elon Musk has vowed to file a ‘thermonuclear lawsuit’ as major advertisers desert X after the tycoon agreed with an anti-Semitic post.
The billionaire, 52, has promised to hit back against what he claims is a ‘fraudulent attack’ on his company by media watchdog non-profit Media Matters for America.
It comes after he sparked a firestorm on Wednesday by responding to a man who claimed: ‘Jewish communities have been pushing dialectical hatred against whites.’
Taking to X, formerly known as Twitter, Musk said: ‘The split second court opens on Monday, X Corp will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.
‘Their board, their donors, their network of dark money, all of them…’
Media Matters earlier this week said it found that corporate advertisements by IBM, Apple, Oracle and Comcast’s Xfinity were being placed alongside antisemitic content.
Apple has paused all advertising on X after owner Elon Musk agreed with a post on X that falsely claimed Jewish people were stoking hatred against white people.
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The billionaire, who has 163 million followers on X, said the user, who referenced the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, was speaking “the actual truth.”
On Friday Axios reported Apple would pause its advertising on the platform after 164 rabbis and activists called on Apple, Google, Amazon and Disney to stop advertising.
IBM, the European Commission and Lions Gate Entertainment have also suspended ads on the platform in response to Musk’s post.
In the bombshell letter, Musk called for his followers to ‘Stand with X to protect free speech’, as he claimed Media Matters ‘misrepresented the real user experience on X in another attempt to undermine freedom of speech and mislead advertisers.’
The company had reported that X was placing adverts companies including Amazon, IBM and NBCUniversal next to content with white nationalist hashtags.
But Musk claims the non-profit alongside ‘legacy media outlets’ have been trying to ‘undermine freedom of expression on our platform because they perceive it as a threat to their ideological narrative and those of their financial supporters’.
It comes as a crisis public relations guru claimed Musk was endangering his companies with his personal scandals.
On Wednesday Musk backtracked on his earlier endorsement of an anti-Semitic post, clarifying that he does not believe hatred of white people does not extend ‘to all Jewish communities.’
Musk, who has been strongly criticized by the Anti-Defamation League and Israel’s Foreign Ministry for his past remarks, then attacked the ADL, accusing them of racism, saying it ‘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.’ Musk added.
Musk doubled down against the ADL hours later, writing: ‘I am deeply offended by ADL’s messaging and any other groups who push de facto anti-white racism or anti-Asian racism or racism of any kind. I’m sick of it. Stop now.’
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IBM said this week that it stopped advertising on X after a report said its ads were appearing alongside material praising Nazis — a fresh setback as the platform tries to win back big brands and their ad dollars, X’s main source of revenue.
The liberal advocacy group Media Matters said in a report Thursday that ads from Apple, Oracle, NBCUniversal’s Bravo network and Comcast also were placed next to anti-Semitic material on X.
‘IBM has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination and we have immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation,’ the company said in a statement.
The European Union’s executive branch said separately Friday that it’s pausing its advertising on X and other social media platforms, in part because of a surge in hate speech.
The White House issued a statement on what it called Musk’s ‘abhorrent’ promotion of antisemitism.
‘We condemn this abhorrent promotion of anti-Semitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans,’ spokesman Andrew Bates said.
‘We all have a responsibility to bring people together against hate, and an obligation to speak out against anyone who attacks the dignity of their fellow Americans and compromises the safety of our communities.’
X CEO Linda Yaccarino said X’s ‘point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board.’
‘I think that’s something we can and should all agree on,’ she posted on Thursday.
The accounts that Media Matters found posting anti-Semitic material will no longer be monetizable and the specific posts will be labeled ‘sensitive media,’ according to a statement from X.
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Musk decried Media Matters as ‘an evil organization.’
The billionaire has a long history of toying with dog-whistle rhetoric about Jewish people, in particular George Soros, who enraged him in May by selling his Tesla stock.
He has also angered people with his response to the Israel-Hamas war.
In the days after the October 7 Hamas terror attack, Musk was forced to delete a tweet which recommended an anti-Semitic account and a promoter of debunked videos as reliable sources of information about the attack on Israel.
The owner of X, formerly Twitter, faced a furious backlash after telling his 159 million followers that the accounts @WarMonitors and @sentdefender were ‘good’ for ‘following the war in real time’.
Followers were quick to point out that @WarMonitors has repeatedly used ‘jew’ as a term of abuse on the platform, telling New York supermarket boss Avi Kaner to ‘mind your own business, jew’.
X isn’t alone in dealing with problematic content since the Hamas-Israel war began.
On Thursday, TikTok removed the hashtag #lettertoamerica after users on the app posted sympathetic videos about Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter justifying the terrorist attacks against Americans on 9/11 and criticizing U.S. support for Israel. The Guardian news outlet, which published the transcript of the letter that was being shared, took it down and replaced it with a statement that directed readers to a news article from 2002 that it said provided more context.
(DAILY MAIL UK)
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