The Weaponized Mob

“When I worked at Twitter, I led the team that placed a fact-checking label on one of Donald Trump’s tweets for the first time. Following the violence of Jan. 6, I helped make the call to ban his account from Twitter altogether. Nothing prepared me for what would happen next.” Yoel Roth explains how his terrible experiences at Twitter are connected to the steady degradation on limits placed on hate speech across platforms. It’s all about people at the highest levels weaponizing the angry mob against people who are simply doing their jobs. We see this in the abuse of election workers falsely accused of election rigging by the person actually trying to rig an election. And we see this when it comes to efforts to control lies, conspiracy theories, and calls for violence online. NYT (Gift Article): Trump Attacked Me. Then Musk Did. It Wasn’t an Accident. “I’ve lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move. This isn’t a story I relish revisiting. But I’ve learned that what happened to me wasn’t an accident … It was a strategy — one that affects not just targeted individuals like me, but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online.”

+ Musk replied that he was ‘against attacking any group, doesn’t matter who it is,’ and that his vision for humanity becoming a space-faring species is undermined by ‘infighting and hatred and negativity.'” Benjamin Netanyahu asks Elon Musk to ‘roll back’ antisemitism on X. Meanwhile, “on Sunday evening, just as Rosh Hashanah was coming to a close, Trump posted a meme on his social-media platform, Truth Social, excoriating ‘liberal Jews’ who had ‘voted to destroy America‘ … ‘Let’s hope you learned from your mistake and make better choices going forward!” (There’s a name for the kind of antisemitism we’re seeing on a regular basis from Trump and Musk: Antisemitism.)