from Hacker News

Musk threatens to sue ADL after blaming it for X ad sales slump

by camjohnson26 on 9/5/23, 4:28 PM with 110 comments

  • by animatethrow on 9/5/23, 5:55 PM

    The ADL has been successfully sued for defamation before. Back in 2000 the ADL lost $10.5 million for defaming a Colorado couple:

    https://jweekly.com/2000/05/12/judge-fines-adl-10-5-million-...

    "On April 28 [2000], the jury found most of the charges leveled by the ADL, based on the tapes, to be 'not substantially true.'"

  • by rsynnott on 9/5/23, 6:50 PM

    At this rate of escalation, he'll be ranting about precious bodily fluids by November.

    "Have you ever seen a microservice drink a glass of water, Mandrake?"

  • by afavour on 9/5/23, 5:59 PM

    > still down 60%, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL

    Sounds like something he ought to be able to substantiate pretty simply, so why not do so?

    I normally hesitate any comparisons between Musk and Trump but the lack of self reflection and baseless threats of legal action are a real commonality. He surely knows he’d have no leg to stand on but still wants to drum up some drama.

  • by skyyler on 9/5/23, 5:22 PM

    This doesn't seem like the greatest idea.
  • by tibbydudeza on 9/5/23, 7:42 PM

    https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-09-05/elon-musk-...

    "Elon Musk comes around to blaming the Jews" as a headline.

    Yep this will work really well :).

  • by meaningjoj on 9/5/23, 8:01 PM

    I'm not seeing how threatening to sue the anti-defamation league is in and of itself antisemitic? Or did he say something else? I think I remember he said something about Soros once, and Soros conspiracies seem way more antisemitic than saying you want to sue the ADL...
  • by shadowgovt on 9/5/23, 7:10 PM

    I'm sure X has nothing to worry about. Maybe a very public fight with the ADL over whether X is, at best, Nazi-user-apologetic will hurt their advertising revenue, but I don't imagine it'll hurt their other business model...

    ... collecting biometric and employment history on every user.

    ... uh oh!

  • by Georgelemental on 9/5/23, 5:49 PM

    Letter from the ADL to the Parliament of Iceland: https://www.althingi.is/altext/erindi/148/148-787.pdf

    > We are confident that the vast majority of American tourists will avoid a country whose reputation is associated with Nazism, even if that association is not justified.

  • by leetharris on 9/5/23, 5:39 PM

    I am trying to think through this from a neutral standpoint. After all, some of the tech world has put in significant effort to silence conservatives on platforms at scale. It's somewhat painful to see even if I am not a conservative.

    Personally, I only follow things I like on Twitter which means I don't see any hate speech. It's hard for me to anecdotally say if things have changed. But it's not hard to imagine that chronically-online groups who have hate for Elon and his companies would try to crumble his social network because they don't agree with his approach.

    This feels like a really slippery slope. Hard to weigh in honestly.

  • by speak_plainly on 9/5/23, 6:00 PM

    Musk posted a few articles of note:

    [Background on the new leader of the ADL and some suspicious activity with Al Sharpton]

    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/al-sharpton...

    [A review of a documentary on anti-semitism that touches on political influence from the ADL]

    https://www.npr.org/2009/11/24/120452232/exploring-the-polit...

    [An article on how Facebook caved to leftist groups like the ADL]

    https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/07/03/activists-...

  • by Racing0461 on 9/5/23, 6:14 PM

    We need to reform section 230.

    Either you are a public square and you gain protection from your users commenting but you can't delete or moderate their content (sans actual spam/child p/etc), or you can moderate/curate your users content but you are no longer protected/can be held liable for things your users post.

    This worse of both worlds we have going on here results in these alphabet soup agencies/ngos having a place on the boardroom directly affecting people's speech.