Edited by: TJVNews.com
The nonprofit organization Secure Community Network, which provides safety consulting and training for Jewish facilities across North America, wrote a letter on Monday to Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, imploring him to clamp down on anti-Semitic content that could endanger lives, as was reported by the New York Times.
In the letter, the group’s chief executive and national director, Michael Masters wrote: “Twitter has an anti-Semitism problem — with hashtags such as #holohoax [Holocaust Hoax] and #killthejews abounding on the site,” as was reported by the Times.
Prior to assuming a leader role in the Security Community Network, Masters, was the chief of staff at the Chicago Police Department and his colleagues in the non-profit Security Community Network are of a law enforcement background, the Times reported. The group offered Musk five recommendations to improve Twitter and the safety of Jewish people, including hiring and training moderators to identify anti-Semitic content, removing it from the platform and closing user accounts that promote violent extremism, according to the NYT report.
Officials from the Security Community Network have observed that over the last several years, the level of hatred towards Jews online has risen dramatically as well as the voicing of conspiracy theories about Jews, including the age old mendacious assertion that somehow Jews control the world through the banking and finance industries.
The Times reported that Masters said that the Security Community Network represents 90 percent of the 7.2 million Jews across North America by providing security training and coordination to synagogues, Hillel groups and other Jewish facilities such as community centers.
Musk, who is worth over $230 billion and is considered the richest person on the planet purchased Twitter for $44 billion and assumed control of the social media platform last Thursday after promising for months to loosen the app’s content moderation standards, the Times reported. Originally, Musk had taken the position that anyone can tweet any kind of content that they so desire without constraint, but last week he told those who advertise on Twitter that the social media site “cannot become a free-for-all hellscape.” On Friday, he vowed to form a content moderation council to make decisions about which posts are acceptable and which should be deleted, the Times reported.
The Times reported that according to an analysis conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (which traditionally monitors and exposes anti-Semitic organizations and individuals) a coordinated anti-Semitic campaign hatched on the anonymous, fringe message board 4chan migrated to Twitter on Friday, spreading anti-Semitic memes and images on the platform.
Masters said the ubiquitous dissemination of anti-Semitic tweets would severely challenge the vision that Musk has for making the social media platform a true public forum for everybody.
In an interview, Masters said, “You can’t have a digital town square if a significant part of the population feels they’re going to get lynched in it,” according to the NYT report.
Mr. Musk and Twitter representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
Masters also told Musk in his letter that Twitter had played a “significant role” in creating what he called the most complex and dynamic set of threats against the American Jewish community in history, and he encouraged Twitter’s new owner to reverse that trend, the NYT reported.
“This is not about the First Amendment,” Masters wrote, as was reported by the NYT. “And it is not about freedom. This violent speech must be monitored and policed like lives depend on it — because they do.” (Additional reporting by Fern Sidman)