Elon Musk claims to be ‘against antisemitism of any kind,’ but has done precious little to prove it

First, X sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that researches online hate speech. Musk accused the CCDH of trying to “harm Twitter’s business by driving advertisers away from the platform with incendiary claims”; the suit itself alleged that the group improperly gained access to X data. And now he’s going after the Anti-Defamation League, the most famous anti-antisemitism outfit in the U.S. As Fortune’s Christiaan Hetzner reports, Musk yesterday threatened to sue the ADL for at least $4 billion in damages for “trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it and me of being antisemitic.”

Musk’s threat of a defamation lawsuit followed his jaw-dropping assertion that “the ADL, because they are so aggressive in their demands to ban social media accounts for even minor infractions, are ironically the biggest generators of antisemitism on this platform!” (That was, by the way, in response to an X post by a far-right YouTuber who is trying to get the ADL banned from X.)

Musk claims to be “against antisemitism of any kind,” but, if that’s the case, he must be really mad at himself for repeatedly churning out the classics of the genre. Accusing Jews of being responsible for their own ill-treatment is one of them. So is the notion that Jews deviously control the hidden levers of power, which is pretty much how I (a descendant of German and Polish Jews, in case you’re wondering) interpret a post like this: “Advertisers avoid controversy, so all that is needed for ADL to crush our U.S. & European ad revenue is to make unfounded accusations… This ‘controversy’ causes advertisers to ‘pause’, but that pause is permanent until ADL gives the green light, which they will not do without us agreeing to secretly suspend or shadowban any account they don’t like.”

Then there’s the time he described the Jewish U.S. military vet Alexander Vindman as being “both puppet and puppeteer,” and the time he tweeted out a quote by neo-Nazi Kevin Alfred Strom, albeit misattributed to Voltaire. Whoops, right?

The best-case scenario here is that Musk isn’t being consciously antisemitic, but is rather displaying the inevitable consequences of bathing in a far-right sea of memes and tropes. Because it isn’t Jews who are scaring away X’s advertisers—it’s the fact that the company is run by a guy who only listens to one side of the political divide and seemingly takes delight in not serving the others, which is a lousy way to operate a so-called public town square.

Musk can claim to be “against antisemitism of any kind” until he’s blue in the face, but actions—and the company one keeps—matter a lot more than words do. More news below.

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David Meyer

NEWSWORTHY

Microsoft and Apple’s EU pleas. Microsoft is trying to get its Bing search engine exempted from new EU antitrust rules, on the basis that it has very little market share in Europe. That’s according to the Financial Times, which says Apple is trying to do the same thing with its iMessage service, on the basis that it doesn’t meet the threshold of 45 million active monthly users in the EU, to bring it under the purview of the new Digital Markets Act. The law places big interoperability requirements on “gatekeeper” platforms, along with restrictions on the contractual terms they can offer.

Kuiper contract. Amazon’s Project Kuiper just scored a big contract ahead of its deployment next year. Reuters reports that the British telecoms giant Vodafone will in the future use the still-unlaunched satellite constellation instead of pricier fiber to connect really remote mobile base stations to its core network. Meanwhile, the Apple-backed rival satellite network operator Globalstar has reportedly bought $64 million worth of launches from SpaceX, which of course has its own connectivity satellite constellation, Starlink.

Indian net neutrality. India’s big telecoms players have asked regulators to let them squeeze cash out of Big Tech, to help cover the cost of the infrastructure that carries popular online services. This is the latest push in a global effort to change how the internet works—as we reported earlier this year, there are fears a similar system could be introduced in Europe. TechCrunch notes that India is the world’s second-biggest wireless market, and that adoption of the telcos’ proposal could constitute an illegal net neutrality violation.

ON OUR FEED

“We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.”

—Microsoft announces the imminent demise of WordPad, the simple word processor it’s been bundling with Windows for nearly three decades. The company added WordPad to a list of deprecated features, saying it “will be removed in a future release of Windows.”

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

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Indonesia gave OpenAI’s Sam Altman, the CEO behind ChatGPT, its first 10-year ‘golden visa’—although it’s not clear he asked for one, by Nicholas Gordon

Visa to send stablecoin USDC over Solana to help pay merchants in crypto, by Ben Weiss

Mycologists warn of ‘life or death’ consequences as foraging guides written with AI chatbots crop up on Amazon, by Steve Mollman

America and China’s $574 billion chip war has already scored an ‘extraordinary success beyond anyone’s wild dreams’ for Joe Biden, by Rachel Shin and Irina Ivanova

It’s not the first time that technology has upended Hollywood’s business model–but the WGA-SAG strikes could be the last chance for artists to get justice, by Stephen R. Greenwald and Paula Landry

BEFORE YOU GO

The crucial Books3 case. Wired has a great piece on Books3, a corpus of nearly 200,000 pirated books that has become a popular dataset for training generative A.I. models—and on the rightsholders who are trying to have Books3 scrubbed from the internet, and who are suing A.I. companies such as Meta that have used the dataset.

As the article puts it: “This fight cuts to the heart of the often vicious disagreements about what role AI should have in our world. Copyright law exists to balance the rights granted to creators with the collective right to access information, at least in theory. The battle over Books3 is about what this balance should look like in the age of A.I.”