X and Tesla CEO Elon Musk (far right) is seen at the 2023 Miami Grand Prix. Photo: Reuters/Hoch Zwei

A group that includes some of the most vocal antisemites on social media has received an important boost from Elon Musk — the billionaire owner of the X platform, formerly known as Twitter — in their campaign to shutter the account of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), one of the best-known Jewish civil rights organizations in the US.

Last Thursday, several accounts began tweeting the hash tag #BantheADL apparently in response to a tweet by the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt.

Greenblatt’s posting noted his “frank and productive” conversation with newly-appointed Twitter chief Linda Yaccarino over the profusion of hate speech on the platform since Musk acquired it in October last year for $44 billion. Several organizations monitoring the platform have charged that antisemitism has surged in the year since Musk’s takeover, with a daily average of more than 12,000 “plausibly antisemitic” tweets, according to research carried out by CASM Technology, a tech firm, and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think-tank.

In the hours after Greenblatt’s tweet, several white supremacist and far right activists began calling on X to close the ADL’s account — among them Andrew Torba, the CEO of the social media platform Gab that was used by neo-Nazi gunman Robert Bowers in the run-up to his massacre of 11 worshipers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue on Oct, 27, 2018, and Matthew Parrott, the founder of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Workers Party. The posts were among the top trending subjects on X for at least 72 hours.

Musk entered the fray by liking and then replying to a tweet by Keith Woods, an Irish neo-Nazi whose YouTube channel is followed by 50,000 subscribers. After Woods falsely accused the ADL of “financially blackmailing social media companies into removing free speech on their platform,” Musk responded that “the ADL has tried very hard to strangle X/Twitter” without offering any evidence. Woods answered by triumphantly tweeting, “Elon Musk likes my call to #BantheADL.”

Musk has flirted with antisemitic and far right themes on his personal Twitter account, which has more than 144 million followers, in the recent past. In May, he compared George Soros — the Hungarian-born Jewish financier who has become the favorite target of the far right — to Magneto, a Jewish villain created by Marvel comics. In the furor that followed, Musk retweeted several posts attacking Soros from an obscure far right activist in Hawaii.

In a commentary on Musk’s boosting of far right activists, the analyst Claire Berlinski observed that “every time Musk ‘likes’ an antisemitic account, or replies, ‘concerning!’ to one of its lunatic claims, some 140 million aimless, vague, discontented young men learn all about this fascinating theory that Jews secretly rule the world.”

Addressing Yaccarino directly, Berlinski told her that she was working for the “most dangerous antisemite in America.”

“Linda, it’s hopeless. You can’t rescue that company,” she wrote.