Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu encourages billionaire businessman Elon Musk to fight anti-Semitism on his social media platform X.
Netanyahu stopped in San Francisco Bay, California, on Monday before traveling to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly, where he will meet President Joe Biden and other world leaders.
He sat down for a one-on-one conversation with Musk, the CEO of the social media platform X’, formerly known as Twitter. The conversation, in which both joked, soon turned to freedom of expression and anti-Semitism.
Musk has clashed with the Anti-Defamation League over his claims that anti-Semitic content has increased and moderation of anti-Semitic posts has decreased since taking over the platform.
League director Jonathan Greenblatt said Musk had “amplified” the messages of neo-Nazis and white supremacists who want to ban the ADL by recently engaging with them on X.
In a Sept. 4 post, Musk claimed the league was trying to “destroy this platform by falsely accusing it and me of being anti-Semitic.” In other posts, he said the league was responsible for a 60% decline in X’s revenue.
The group met with X CEO Linda Yaccarino this month. Both Musk and Yaccarino recently posted messages speaking out against anti-Semitism.
Netanyahu noted that Musk had spoken out against anti-Semitism and asked him to do more on the site.
“I hope that within the confines of the First Amendment you will find the opportunity not only to stop, or as best as possible, curb anti-Semitism, but also to curb any collective hatred of a people that anti-Semitism represents,” he said.
“I’m obviously against anti-Semitism,” Musk replied. “I am against anything that promotes hatred and conflict.”
Musk said that with 100 to 200 million posts on X in a day, “some of them are going to be bad.” He reiterated the platform’s policy of neither promoting nor amplifying hate speech. It said it wanted to protect free speech, but also hinted at the possibility of charging users to use the site to suppress negative posts.
“Freedom of speech means that sometimes someone will say something you don’t like. This doesn’t mean you have to force negativity on people. Our overall goal is to maximize the time users spend without regrets. We can {anti- “Semitism is ahead of its time. We will not promote hate speech,” Musk said, according to The Jerusalem Post.
Under Musk, the new “X” ended Twitter’s previous censorship campaigns on all sorts of topics and changed its rules so that offensive posts are not routinely removed. Instead, their visibility is limited, so people have to search for them if they want to see them. Musk calls it “freedom of speech, not freedom of expression.”
Noting the protests and citing criticism he received for hosting the prime minister, Musk on Monday called on Netanyahu to talk about his plan to overhaul Israel’s justice system.
Netanyahu said he was strengthening the country’s democracy by introducing checks and balances at the Supreme Court and declared that Israel had the most active judiciary in the world, the Jerusalem Post reported.
Netanyahu also said he would focus on advancing the plan once he returned to Israel. The best scenario, he said, would be to find a consensus plan with the opposition, but if there was no such option, he indicated he would turn to the public to make a minor correction in the selection of judges.
Both also spoke about the possibilities and risks of artificial intelligence and the need to regulate its development.
