The nonprofit group Safe Neighborhood Community, which offers security consulting and coaching for Jewish amenities throughout North America, wrote a letter on Monday to Elon Musk, Twitter’s new proprietor, imploring him to clamp down on antisemitic content material that would endanger lives.
“Twitter has an antisemitism drawback — with hashtags comparable to #holohoax [Holocaust Hoax] and #killthejews abounding on the positioning,” Michael Masters, the group’s nationwide director and chief government, wrote within the letter.
The group is made up of many former legislation enforcement officers, together with Mr. Masters, who was the chief of workers on the Chicago Police Division. It gave Mr. Musk 5 suggestions to enhance Twitter and the security of Jewish folks, together with hiring and coaching moderators to determine antisemitic content material, eradicating it from the platform and shutting person accounts that promote violent extremism.
Officers on the nonprofit say they’ve noticed a swell of on-line posts expressing hate towards or conspiracy theories about Jewish folks in the previous few years. The group touches 90 p.c of the 7.2 million Jews throughout North America, Mr. Masters mentioned, offering safety coaching and coordination to synagogues, Hillel teams and different Jewish amenities.
Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest individual, assumed management of Twitter on Thursday after promising for months to loosen the app’s content material moderation requirements. He appeared to take a step again from that anything-goes strategy final week, telling Twitter advertisers on Thursday that the platform “can not grow to be a free-for-all hellscape.” On Friday, he vowed to type a content material moderation council to make selections about which posts are acceptable and which must be deleted.
However a coordinated antisemitic marketing campaign hatched on the nameless, fringe message board 4chan migrated to Twitter on Friday, spreading antisemitic memes and pictures on the platform, in keeping with an evaluation by the Anti-Defamation League.
Mr. Masters mentioned that the unfold of antisemitism on Twitter imperiled Mr. Musk’s imaginative and prescient for making the social media platform a city sq. for all.
“You’ll be able to’t have a digital city sq. if a big a part of the inhabitants feels they’re going to get lynched in it,” Mr. Masters mentioned in an interview.
Mr. Musk and Twitter representatives didn’t reply to requests for remark.
In his letter, Mr. Masters informed Mr. Musk that Twitter has performed a “important function” in creating what he known as probably the most advanced and dynamic set of threats towards the American Jewish group in historical past, and he inspired Twitter’s new proprietor to reverse that development.
“This isn’t in regards to the first modification,” Mr. Masters wrote. “And it isn’t about freedom. This violent speech have to be monitored and policed like lives depend upon it — as a result of they do.”
