Big Government And Big Corporations Wage World War On Free Speech
State and corporate attacks on X and other social media platforms are the greatest threat to free speech since the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th Century
Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, is a hotbed of bigotry and hate, the mainstream media claims. X is a vehicle through which racist and antisemitic memes move from the fringe to the mainstream, argues the Washington Post. “An antisemitic post on Elon Musk’s X is not exactly news,” wrote reporter Will Oremus on Thursday. “But new research finds the site has emerged as a conduit to mainstream exposure for a fresh wave of automated hate memes, generated using cutting-edge AI image tools by trolls on the notorious online forum 4chan.”
Oremus cited a report from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which states that 4chan members spread “AI Jew memes” on X, using 43 different images and reaching a total of 2.2 million views. Examples of AI-generated antisemitic images on X included “Taylor Swift in a Nazi officer’s uniform sliding a Jewish man into an oven.” The most widely shared post was allegedly “Pixar’s Nazi Germany,” which showed “a montage of four AI-generated scenes from an imaginary animated movie, depicting smiling Nazis running concentration camps and leading Jewish children and adults into gas chambers.”
The Washington Post and CCDH concede that some of these images were also found on TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, and Facebook. CCDH says that it focused on X because of its belief that the platform under Musk is “a particularly hospitable environment for explicitly hateful content to reach a wider audience.” This is an admission that CCDH’s methods were not unbiased, and that the group assumed a conclusion before it even began conducting its research.
The Post and CCDH say that of the 66 incidents of antisemitic AI images, only 3 were actioned by X even though they were reported and appear to violate the platform’s policy against hateful conduct.
But neither CCDH nor the Washington Post shared the data from the report so that it could be independently verified. Until the full data is made available, we cannot see the actual posts in question and confirm that they were serious instances of real hate, as opposed to other types of speech.
And there is reason to be suspicious about the allegations. In a previous CCDH report on antisemitism, Public found that the nonprofit had exaggerated the reach of content it flagged as hateful. What’s more, CCDH’s new report is not the only attack on Musk and Twitter. These attacks appear to be a coordinated effort.