Elon Musk and the ADL
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Anonymous
Like anything else, if you view that tweet in isolation, it looks very odd and paranoid. But if you read the surrounding tweets, he lays out his concerns about recent California legislation requiring that parents affirm a gender transition. In fact, this is the majority position in the US. It's not even on partisan lines, it's just the mainstream view: https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3991685-majority-of-americans-oppose-gender-affirming-care-for-minors-trans-women-participating-in-sports-poll/amp/ This is in no way similar to Kanye's unhinged rants, nor is it antisemitic or bigoted. Lots of parents who love and support their trans kids choose not to use puberty blockers, and it's not bigoted of them. It's their choice about what's best for their kid's health. |
Anonymous
The unhinged part is where it completely muddles different things and makes wild, reaching comparisons. The people commenting on the California bill are equating it to forced sterilization and comparing it to a governmental decision such as when the Indian Health Service did non-consentual sterilization of native american women. The bill is nothing of the kind and it is not a correct analogy. The bill is about custody hearings for divorced couples with trans children, and whether judges should factor in if one parent supports their child's decision to transition versus the other parent who doesn't. Also, it has absolutely nothing to do with participation in sports. |
Anonymous
It should also be noted that there isn't even a legal definition of what "affirmation" means. It doesn't automatically assume surgery and sterilization et cetera. |
Anonymous
All it says is that Elon Musk can walk it back when he says something unhinged. I mean what the hell was that feud with the rescuer of the kids trapped in a cave in Thailand? He wanted them to use his submarine and they didn't. Normal people would just let it drop. Why did he have to make attacks, call the rescuer "pedo guy"? Unforced error. Yes he survived his defamation trial but because he convinced the jury it was a joke and he deleted the tweet. But it does not explain why their lack of interest in his submarine ended up in a twitter feud. Not normal. Also not normal is for the Chairman of a company to claim he is taking the company private and declaring "funding secured" when in fact it was not. This cost his company money and cost him the chairmanship. A normal chairman knows what securities fraud is. This is securities fraud. But the worst is probably the fact that he did not really want to buy Twitter, but was forced to do so. Because he made a $44b bid that waived due diligence. Unheard of for any significant transaction. And that more than anything else shows the depth of his problems. Every single thing he does with Twitter is due to the fact that he put himself in a financial hole by overpaying, and now he is desperate to keep twitter from falling into the hands of the bankers. |
Anonymous
I don't know enough about the bill. If it's clear that affirmation can also be openness to the possibility that the condition may be transitory (many people simply stop having feelings of gender dysphoria) or that it may include therapy for gender dysphoria that might probe whether or not the child is truly psychologically better off living as the other gender, the his comment is strange. If it means that if a therapist recommends medical (not psychological) intervention then a parent must comply, then his comment makes sense. Some people do experience sterilization after these treatments, although its not clear how common it is. In any case, his comments on a CA bill, even if considered outrageous in some camps, don't really veer into unhinged, unstable, etc. Half the country holds right of center views; they can't all be insane. |
Anonymous
These are all fair points. The cave thing was weird and the lead up to the Twitter acquisition shows Elon was clearly not in a super logical headspace. I don't see him as Kanye-level schizophrenic though. I'm just not buying that narrative. |
Anonymous
I don't think anyone believes Musk is schizophrenic (BTW Kanye is bipolar) Nevertheless he has a habit of making reckless and unfounded claims that later cause him, or his companies, trouble. His attack on the ADL is exactly that. Several organizations conducted research which led them to the conclusion that anti-semitic tweets escalated after he took over Twitter and fired most of the staff moderating content. So they came by the opinion honestly and therefore he would lose his defamation case without a doubt. He also wants to go after them for interfering with his business, and even if they encouraged a boycott, it's constitutionally protected speech, as unanimously decided by the Supreme Court over 40 years ago. The pattern of dubious excuses for his company's failures is nothing new for Musk. Over the course of the Twitter acquisition he tried to back out of it claiming he was deceived about the number of bot accounts. Mind you, he claimed he was going to buy the thing in part to clean up the bot problem. He was given reports, which he did not like. He was given a raw feed of Twitter, and he was unable to find what he wanted with that. But the biggest problem for him is that he *waived due diligence* so he had no legal way to back out. The stock had already fallen 12% since he made the bid and he was facing a shareholder lawsuit had he somehow wiggled out of the deal. What he failed to recognize is that Twitter is not an essential platform for advertisers. And to them, his disbanding of the Trust and Safety advisory group, massive layoffs in the trust and safety area of the company including key executives, and the results to date make Twitter more of a risk than a benefit. A brand manager will never get kudos for bravely advertising on Twitter. But they sure as hell could get fired for doing it, if something goes terribly wrong. |
Anonymous
Wow. In fact, we might do well to remember that you have the performative antisemitism the Soviets taught your 1960s and '70s intellectual ancestors to practice. |
Anonymous
He's clearly made a number of mistakes with regard to Twitter. However, he did need to change the leadership in Trust and Safety, since they clearly had massive differences in beliefs about what should and shouldn't be censored. That team famously banned Trump for "incitement of violence" while at the same time allowing other, obvious forms of incitement to go unchecked (example, when scotus had to consider whether Twitter can be sued for allowing Islamist terrorists to communicate and coordinate on its platform: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna71662). And at the same time that Trump was expelled, other world leaders with an even more extreme and violent approach were allowed to stay on. This lack of even-handedness created serious credibility issues for that particular T&S leadership team. I tend to agree that reducing the size of the team was a mistake. People rarely assess the sizes of the teams of different platforms for comparison, but Twitters team was already quite small. That said, most of the moderation work was done by algorithms so these teams weren't actually reviewing the tweets the way people seem to think they were. Their functions are much broader. I tend to think that suing the ADL is the right choice. First, I suspect that the data isn't as slam dunk as the left thinks. This is especially true bc Elon immediately banned a bunch of Islamic terrorist groups, and they tend to make up the most of the antisemitic sentiment in the world. Despite what the media machines tell us, there simply aren't that many avowed white nationalists out there tweeting. There were a *lot* of Islamic extremists tweeting, often with uncivil views of what fate should face Israel. I really have trouble squaring this mathematically, how these accounts can be banned and yet antisemitism increases. I'd be very interested in unbiased data. Second, it's easy to manipulate statistics about subjective things. If Elon can show other plausible interpretations of the data, he wins the PR war. I don't think he'll win the case bc it will be extremely difficult to prove malice. But I think it will serve as a deterrent to other groups, and will improve their PR. |
Anonymous
Anonymous
The ADL suit (if it actually happens) is a definite loss for him. One of the four tests is negligence. And since their opinion was based on reasonable study data, they were not negligent. |
Anonymous
Yes, if you read my post, I agree that he will lose the case if it goes to court. But, litigation often serves a purpose even when it isn't a strong legal case, and I suspect that Elon's goal doesn't require winning. He's attempting to shift the conversation to one where his critics are not assumed to he correct, and that they have to prove they are correct. And, he's deterring other groups from coming for him in a similar manner. |
Anonymous
DP... If he loses (which he will) then his critics turn out to be correct and his strategy is a fail. |
Anonymous
Did you bother to read the existing research before you made this statement? I don't see how a protracted lawsuit with the Anti Defamation League is going to do anything but repel advertisers for a protracted amount of time. And when it's over, the ADL will win. All the researchers putting out these reports on Twitter know that they can't be sued successfully as long as they have a reasonable methodology which they disclose along with their conclusions. |
Anonymous
Musk made changes in Trust & Safety and now Twitter is objectively worse. And yes, they do still censor - but for even more warped and petty reasons than the reasons Twitter had prior to Musk's takeover. |