Elon Musk announced on Monday that he plans to sue the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for defamation of his social network X (formerly known as Twitter). As Musk highlighted in several posts on the platform, advertising revenue has dropped about 60%, and the main culprit of this collapse is ADL:
Based on what we’ve heard from advertisers, ADL seems to be responsible for most of our revenue loss.
Giving them maximum benefit of the doubt, I don’t see any scenario where they’re responsible for less than 10% of the value destruction, so ~$4 billion.
Document discovery of…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 4, 2023
For that reason, Musk threatened to sue the anti-hate organization, while jokingly insinuating that ADL should "drop the 'anti' part of their name":
If this continues, we will have no choice but to file a defamation suit against, ironically, the “Anti-Defamation” League.
If they lose the defamation suit, we will insist that they drop the the “anti” part of their name, since obviously … 😂
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 4, 2023
Elon Musk says ADL tried to close X profiles
Musk did not stop there. He went on to make his plea against the ADL and directly identified some of accounts that the organization has targeted. In fact, he claimed, X had been pressured to close profiles that for "anti-Semitism":
ADL has pushed hard for us to shut down accounts like Chaya’s, even though it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, which is their supposed charter!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 4, 2023
Reactions to this were not long in coming. One of the first was Libs of TikTok, the account run by the aforementioned Chaya Raichik. The account requested that Musk publish a list of all those affected so that they could take action against the ADL if necessary:
BREAKING: Elon suggests he will release all the data relating to the ADL and other organizations pushing to censor and silence X accounts 👀
We need a full list of which organizations pushed for censorship and which accounts were affected!
THINGS ARE ABOUT TO GET WILD pic.twitter.com/SdHmWf9A7T
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 4, 2023
Elon Musk assured that he would, starting next week. As with the Twitter Files, he assured that he would post the information he has and reveal the accounts that ADL requested to ban or censor:
BREAKING: #TheADLFiles showing the ADL’s requests to ban and censor X accounts will be released next week! 👀 https://t.co/5m2Y5K3TPZ
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 4, 2023
