After Xwitter became one of the world’s most active spreaders of hate, including a surge in antisemitism that owner Elon Musk readily participated in but now says he is very sorry for, the deranged tech billionaire travelled to Poland this week to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp and to attend a conference on antisemitism held by the European Jewish Association in Krakow. While he was there, he was interviewed by Ben Shapiro, and they both agreed that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives are a breeding ground for antisemitism somehow, because DEI pretends there are racial hierarchies in America, where we are in fact all equal.
And now everything is fine! Just don’t pay any attention to all the antisemitism that remains on Twitter, because free speech is the only way to deal with it, or at least have more of it shoveled into your feed. Please come back, advertisers.
Musk said he’d been “naive” about antisemitism, claiming he just didn’t see it because so many of his friends are Jewish and golly, he just had no idea, especially since he’s pretty sure he’s almost Jewish himself, heh-heh.
“In the circles that I move, I see almost no antisemitism,” Musk said at the conference in a discussion with conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire. “And, you know, there’s this old joke ‘I’ve got like this one Jewish friend.’ No, I have like two-thirds of my friends are Jewish. I have twice as many Jewish friends as non-Jewish friends. I’m like Jewish by association, I’m aspirationally Jewish.”
But as for the antisemitism, he also said that the best way to stop its spread is to let it thrive and hope enough decent people argue it out of existence, since as everyone knows, pure reason and logic always triumph in social media:
“The overarching goal for the X platform is to be the best source of truth in the world,” he said. The “relentless pursuit of the truth is the goal with X and allowing people to say what they want to say, even if it’s controversial, provided that it does not break the law.”
It’s so true! Since slashing the content moderation staff, eliminating verification of public figures, and reinstating all the Nazis, Xitter has become far more accurate than it ever was before, at least if you’re looking for valid information on how vaccines will turn you into mutants.
As the panel with Shapiro got underway, the audience was treated to some made-up tweets that imagined how social media could have prevented the Holocaust!! You know, if Xitter had been in business in Germany in the 1930s, and if the Nazi government had allowed unrestricted online communication in the Reich, and also if the Nazis had allowed Jews to escape, and if the Nazis hadn’t also confiscated Jewish families’ wealth, and oh yes, if other countries, including the USA, weren’t mostly dead-set against allowing Jewish refugees to come. We’re on deadline so we’ve probably skipped a few dozen other “ifs,” but if all this is getting you down a bit, here is a very good old New York Times story (gift link) about how Carl Laemmle, the Jewish chief of Universal Pictures back in the 1930s, managed to bring 300 Jews from Germany to the US. Spoiler: You’ll probably cry, and it was a lot harder to do than sending a tweet.
But you see, in the completely artificial world of the thought experiment, the official “Auschwitz Camp” account might claim Jews were well-treated, but then Community Notes would democratically debunk that claim!
Other fake historical tweets imagined Mordechai Anielewicz, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, calling on social media for everyone to join him in fighting off the Nazis, and someone replying “Give them hell!”
Again, that’s a very imaginative exchange, since somehow in that scenario the SS were liquidating the ghetto but not blocking communication. It’s the sort of simpleton history fan fiction that imagines that if only Germany had had a Second Amendment, the Holocaust would never have happened.
It’s still not clear whether the imaginary Holocaust-preventing tweets were produced by Musk’s team, or by the hosts of the conference, or what, but Shapiro and Musk definitely agreed that free speech on Twitter would have saved millions. Again, assuming the Nazis had governed completely differently, in multiple ways.
The scenario also assumes that massive numbers of Good Germans who paid their 20 or so Reichsmarks a month to get a blue swastika wouldn’t have been swarming every tweet about atrocities, dismissing them as fake news, and organizing brownshirts to go beat the living shit out of the posters. Details, details.
In mere reality, of course, Musk’s Twitter happily complies with most countries’ censorship requests — more frequently than under the old management —including takedown requests from the governments of Turkey, South Korea, and India. The app is banned outright in China, Russia, Iran, Myanmar, and elsewhere.
Maybe if Twitter today were active in Myanmar, we bet the Rohingya people would be using it to call attention to their plight, at least when the the government and its online rage brigades weren’t targeting the Rohingya for genocide, like how they used Facebook. We guess this social media thing really is a mixed bag, you know?
But boy oh boy, if Xwitter only had the same freedom to spread news in those countries that it did in Imaginary Nazi Germany, those places would probably be much nicer to live in.
PREVIOUSLY!
[AP / Al Jazeera / NYT (gift link)
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations, and we don’t even demand you pay eight bucks a month to be able to revise your comments. If you can, please subscribe, or if a one-time donation is more up your alley, we have this button for you because the alleys beat the axes.
Source link
#Elon #Musk #Visits #Auschwitz #Solves #Antisemitism