Elon Musk

The sale by George Soros of a (comparatively) modest holding in Elon Musk’s Tesla car company seems to have sent Musk into a Twitter tirade last week.

“He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization,” Musk tweeted in a reckles overreaction. “Soros hates humanity.”

The context of the smear is worth a moment of consideration. A man who sinks a chunk of his estimated $185 billion US pile into a space flight hobby says that a man who has donated (at a minimum) $32 billion US into building civil society in the former Soviet bloc and other countries “hates humanity.”

Beyond this context is a whole lot of subtext.

There is nothing essentially wrong with a public figure criticizing another public figure. If the target feels he has been libeled, there are legal recourses available. That’s not really the issue here.

As one of the world’s foremost funders of liberal causes, Soros draws criticism from plenty of people who don’t agree with his politics. Fair enough. But “Soros” has become a shorthand. Generations of people have used the name “Rothschild” to invoke a conspiracy of Jewish wealth and power. “Soros” is a 21st-century update of that conspiracy.

This is a bit dicey. It is fair to criticize someone who dumps billions of dollars into causes you disagree with. If the person happens to be Jewish, that doesn’t make you antisemitic. If you use that person’s name as a stand-in for a complex of ideas about Jews more generally manipulating events with wealth and the manipulative force that can come with it, that is antisemitic. But, of course, getting into the head of a suspected bigot is impossible. One person can accuse another of racism, the accused can deny it and neither is any further ahead. Sometimes the accused may not even be conscious of what they have done.

But Musk tipped his hand. He launched his outburst with: “Soros reminds me of Magneto.”

Magneto is a villain in the Marvel Comics franchise X-Men. Like Soros, Magneto is a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust.

The idea that Soros “hates humanity” is an especially laden accusation. It seems like a peculiar assertion – unless one is familiar with centuries of slander against Jewish people, which has posited that Jews are the embodiment of Satan, the enemy of all things good. In Christian theology, including official Catholic doctrine until the mid-1960s, Jews were accused of deicide, of literal God-killing, of destroying what is most sacred to humanity. To accuse a Jew in 2023 of hating humanity – and all that implies in the context of funding social change movements – is to invoke (intentionally or not) millennia of deadly ideas about Jewish evil-doing. To also invoke a (Jewish) cartoon villain in the process makes Musk’s playing to pervasive tropes about Soros, money, Jews and power seem more deliberate.

This is what is so confounding about racism and bigotry in general, and antisemitism in particular: it so often manifests not as outright intolerance and hatred but as unconscious or barely conscious bias that motivates our beliefs and actions without us knowing it. In some ways, this is the more frightening prospect. It is easy to identify and condemn the most overt acts of racism or hatred. Parsing and reproving harmful, unconscious ideas is much more challenging.

We are not all in a position (thankfully!) to have our Tweets or other late-night brainwaves analyzed by millions. Musk hosts a powerful platform and his speech can move financial markets and mobilize followers. Ideally, he may take time to reflect on whether he carries unconscious biases that need examining.

For us, there are at least two lessons. First, we are reminded that confronting antisemitism is not as easy as condemning those who exhibit the most obvious signs. Second, while we are critical of one of the most prominent people in the world letting slip what appear to be deep-seated conspiratorial ideas that project onto a single individual a host of negative characteristics attributed to the group to which he belongs, we would do well to consider how we use the platforms we each have in our daily lives in the service of justice, anti-racism and truth.

Elon Musk’s purchase of the social media behemoth Twitter, which appears probable, is raising questions about what the new management could mean to users and society at large. For Jewish tweeters and others, there are red flags.

The growth of social media of all varieties over the past 15 years has resulted in a massive change in the public dialogue. People have some ability to amplify or diminish the voices they do or do not want to hear, resulting in an unprecedented ability to self-select the information (or misinformation) to which we are exposed. The relative anonymity of the media has had additional harmful impacts, with racist, misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic and other hateful statements being posted in volumes too massive to effectively police. The spike in antisemitic hate crimes we have seen in recent years is almost certainly a result, in part, of online antisemitism moving into the “real” world.

Since 2016, when Russian and other bad actors influenced the U.S. presidential election in favour of Donald Trump, some platforms, including Twitter, have been driven to address some of the most egregious content on their sites and abuse of the medium. Their efforts, however imperfect and inadequate, reflect an assumption that hate speech should not be accepted.

Musk’s planned purchase of Twitter (which has a number of hurdles yet to overcome) raises fears among some that his self-identification as a “free speech absolutist” may reverse the small strides Twitter has made in addressing hate speech.

If Musk, who is presumed to be the richest person on earth and who is known to be a micromanager, chooses to imprint on Twitter his vision of absolute free speech, we should expect the limited efforts to police the worst content will be diminished or eliminated.

Of course, Musk would not be the final arbiter of what is acceptable. He may be the richest person on earth and Twitter may be among the most powerful communications platforms ever known, but they are still subject to government oversight.

Among the challenges, of course, is that Twitter, like the rest of the internet, effectively knows no national boundaries. So, while the United States is lenient toward extreme speech, different countries take a different approach.

For example, Canada’s Parliament is considering two proposals to make it illegal to deny or diminish the historical facts of the Holocaust. Legislation like this – as well as existing hate crimes laws that prohibit the targeting of identifiable groups – will inevitably come up against transnational norms set by platforms like Twitter. Will social media platforms face endless legal challenges? Or will the sheer volume of offences make it impossible to challenge any but the most outrageous affronts?

Canadians have always had a different approach to free speech than our American cousins. Our Parliament, like many in Europe, recognizes limitations in the interest of national harmony. These often lead to contentious debates over where lines should be drawn. Introduce an anarchic, foreign-owned social media platform into the equation and these discussions become far more complicated.

These are difficult issues. In a perfect world, absolute free speech would be ideal, because, again in a perfect world, individuals themselves would balance their right to expression with their responsibilities as citizens of a pluralistic society. But, we do not live in a perfect world and some compulsion sadly seems necessary to prevent, say, outright incitement to murder or genocide.

Here, though, is something not difficult or complicated at all – we do not need legislation or philosophical debates around freedom in order to counter hate speech right now. In this space, over many years, we have argued that the best way to confront bad, or hateful, speech is not stifling that speech, but countering it with truth, compassion and decency. Silencing hatred (even if it were possible in the wired world) will not eliminate hatred. We are in a war of words, and more words, not fewer, should be our approach.

A magnificent case-in-point occurred in the past month.

After the student society of the University of British Columbia passed a resolution endorsing the boycott movement against Israel, Santa Ono, the president of the university, responded with a thoughtful statement condemning BDS.

Too often, destructive, hateful messages like anti-Israel boycott resolutions are met with silence, usually with the excuse that such resolutions or protests are legitimate expressions of free speech. Of course, they may well be. But this argument, which was used by UBC administrators and others in the past, misses the point. Free speech does not mean the right to have one’s opinions uncontested. As Ono’s statement makes clear, both sides have a right to have their voices heard. That is free speech.

At a time when too many campuses across North America are roiling with anti-Israel spectacles, the significance of a statement like Ono’s did not go unnoticed. In fact, the university president received a letter from another president. Isaac Herzog, the president of Israel, wrote a “Dear Santa” letter, thanking Ono for his unequivocal statement.

That Israel’s head of state would intervene to express gratitude for Ono’s statement is itself a statement of how serious the threats are from uncontested hate speech. But it also reminds us that we do not need legislation or courts to stand up – as individuals and as a community – against egregious attacks. Every person has a voice. Some use it to spread misinformation and hatred. Others use it for good.