The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) are nongovernmental organizations, their leaders say. When they demand more censorship of online hate speech, as they are currently doing of X, formerly Twitter, those NGOs are doing it as free citizens and not, say, as government agents.
But the fact of the matter is that the US and other Western governments fund ISD, the UK government indirectly funds CCDH, and, for at least 40 years, ADL spied on its enemies and shared intelligence with the US, Israel and other governments. The reason all of this matters is that ADL’s advertiser boycott against X may be an effort by governments to regain the ability to censor users on X that they had under Twitter before Musk’s takeover last November. …
ADL’s main goal is supposed to be stopping “the defamation of the Jewish people,” but the organization is using the legacy of antisemitism and the Holocaust to justify unrelated censorial advocacy work.
[Musk threatened to sue the ADL for defamation, and to force them to remove the “Anti-” from their name in order to be more accurate. That’s probably just venting by Musk, but if he’s serious about it, he’s probably wasting his time. He definitely falls within the Sullivan standard as a public person, and while the ADL’s claims about Twitter stoking violence are specious, it’s the kind of political debate to which defamation doesn’t usually apply. This speculation that ADL is acting as a proxy for now-exposed direct government censorship should be taken for exactly that — speculation — although it’s worth noting that most people were skeptical that the Big Tech/government censorship complex existed in the first place. Anyway, it’s an interesting speculative hypothesis, but Gutentag doesn’t supply any evidence for it, at least not in the publicly available portion of his essay. — Ed]
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