<div class="header-image"></div> <table class="table-header"> <thead> <tr> <th colspan="2"></th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>2025-03-22</td> <td style="text-align: right;"><a href="About.md" class="internal-link">About</a></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> # X and the Increase of Online Antisemitism  Back in 2018 I made a [post on the Minds platform](../Blog/2024-05-26%20Alex%20Jones%20Is%20a%20Crazy%20Kook%20and%20That's%20Why%20I%20Like%20Him.md) in reference to Alex Jones being purged from every platform under the sun. In it, I made the argument that banning Alex Jones and censoring his ideas was a mistake. I thought there was room in the world for some conspiratorial fantasy, and removing it could be harmful to our culture. Not to mention the existence of Alex Jones is a great demonstration of what bullshit actually looks like. I made the argument that there is reason to ban anything, if you feign the proper outrage and convince enough people. In times past, there have been groups protesting to ban heavy metal, hip hop, The Simpsons, Jesus Christ Superstar, Elvis Presley, alcohol, John Lennon... I could go on and on. But if we had listened to the mob, if we prohibited all this and more, our culture would be less for it. And wild conspiracies that sound like X-Files episodes have a place in our culture too. Conspiracies can be fun! Case in point:  >[!quote] >*"But if we take away all of this culture, including stories of strange conspiratorial fantasies, just to appease a populace that's afraid boogeymen are around every corner, we lose ourselves in the process.* > >*"We forget how to grow up."* > > &mdash; Candid Apples 2024-05-26, [reposted here](../Blog/2024-05-26%20Alex%20Jones%20Is%20a%20Crazy%20Kook%20and%20That's%20Why%20I%20Like%20Him.md) from Minds.com This would include flat-earth, 9/11 conspiracies, and a monocle-wearing, moustache-twirling cabal of Jews orchestrating evil plans in smokey rooms like a bunch of James Bond villains. I've had reason to rethink this position lately however, as conspiracies have been taking over the minds of the public in a way I have never seen before. This is worse than the anti-vaccine mania that emerged from the Jenny McCarthy era, mutating into what it became during the Covid pandemic. I've seen these conspiracies before, but only in small, online Neo-Nazi circles. These are comprised of the Holocaust-denying, Hitler-worshipping fringe that hates everyone who isn't a blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan. These circles have grown and multiplied to the extent that their ideas are gaining mainstream acceptance. And they're being adopted by not only the Right, but the pro-Palistinian Left as well. It's become fashionable to hate Jews again. I wish I could blame it all on policy changes at Twitter, but Elon has owned Twitter for over 2 years now, and this has only been a phenomenon for 2 months. The sudden increase has been staggering. I can't really blame it on Trump either, as he's been solidly on the side of Israel for as long as he's been in politics, and the antisemitic contingency on the right has spoken out *against* Trump for exactly this. It's difficult to put a finger on it, but it's unmistakable. In the last couple weeks, Joe Rogan has had on no less than 2 different pundits making a living off blaming Israel for 9/11 and other crazy conspiracies. Candice Owen has a podcast that rivals the top Left wing podcasts. And they all espouse the same crazy conspiratorial nonsense that only Neo-Nazis did just a few years ago before the pro-Palestine crowd started making Jew-hatred fashionable on the Left. It's impossible to read up on anything to do with the Israeli/Palistinian conflict without running into raw, naked, antisemitism. I've been wondering, now, if maybe my perspective wasn't a little skewed in my Alex Jones post. When I wrote that [Debate is a Luxury of the Past](../Blog/2024-08-25%20Debate%20is%20a%20Luxury%20of%20the%20Past.md), I even used Holocaust denial as an example of abhorrent speech we should allow, embedding an old Phil Donnahue show openly discussing those views, facilitating debate between the people promoting them and the audience. But I didn't take into account just how much social media has changed the way people think, or spread ideas. All barriers of acceptable ideas have broken down. What was once relegated to the worst of society, the skinheads beating the shit out of anyone different than they, the Nazis congregating on Charlottesville, is now an uncomfortable debate over dinner, or discussed in Starbucks over a latte. This would never have happened without the Internet and the ability of crazy people to interject themselves into anyone's conversation. It's all just so depressing. And thus, I began to doubt my own convictions. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the Twitter of old had it right: maybe we *should* be kicking all these Nazis offline. And then I saw this:  *Sean Connery discussing masculinity and his treatment of women with Barbara Walters* Barbara Walters was never attacked for "platforming a misogynist" after this. And she didn't really push back at all either. She just let him talk, and let people make up their own minds. I'm sure there were plenty of people out there who agreed with Connery on this too. But it sparked a conversation. The world doesn't find his views acceptable any more. There was also a time when the world didn't accept antisemitic views either. But here's the big difference: We didn't spend time rounding up all the misogynists back then. We let the conversation happen. On the other hand, we just spent ten years banning all bigots (and many others who weren't) off all the major social media platforms, relegating them to other, smaller platforms populated by proud extremists, where outlandish conspiracies were circulated and refined specifically to justify their own bigotry. And as more people got kicked off of different platforms for various reasons (I was kicked of Twitter myself for [telling a journalist to learn to code](https://reason.com/2019/03/11/learn-to-code-twitter-harassment-ross/)), those alternative platforms became larger and more popular. I tried a few, myself. One of the earlier places I tried was Gab, but I found that it was impossible to escape the horrible people found there. They were all a bunch of racists and antisemites. They had swastikas in their bios, and posted articles from The Daily Stormer. I can only imagine how many people ended up on that site just for [posting an NPC meme](https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-45888176), or god knows what else. How many actually got caught up in holocaust-denial with no one else around to call people out on their bullshit? And now, after years of indoctrination and festering resentment, all these people are back on Twitter, and they want to tell everyone how much they should hate the Jews. I have to emphatically say here: without the banning of so many people for such stupid reasons, we wouldn't have this problem. But now it's here, and Twitter is no fun any more. It's become Gab, and I just don't have the energy to keep talking to Nazis. The temptation is to leave Twitter again, but in truth, I don't want to start over on another platform either. Plus there's really nowhere else to go at this point. There's nowhere else that I feel like I can just be myself. I always feel like I'm hiding. I've tried Mastodon, and Bluesky, and while these can be good for some things, reasonable conversation is definitely not one of them. All the really awful people on the extreme Left vacated Twitter and went there. Mastodon and Bluesky are basically Gab but for the those on the other side of that [small gap at the end of the horseshoe](https://discover.hubpages.com/politics/horseshoe-theory-political-left-and-right). But then I remembered: I don't have to quit Twitter, or leave. I can simply ignore whatever I don't want to see. One of the things I've always said about platform moderation is that there's no reason to restrict what anyone says, so long as everyone has the tools to curate their own timeline. Giving users control over their own experience is far more important than actively moderating content. Twitter has some powerful tools allowing users to do this, and it's about time I started utilising some of them. So I've started to mute some words from showing up in my mentions and timeline: - palestine - palestinian - gaza - genocide - andrew tate - tate brothers - elon musk - donald trump - candice owens - ian carroll - fuentes This is a good start. I would have liked to only mute "musk" and "trump" but those are useful English words. I muted "gaza," "palestine," and "genocide" because I only ever see those words used to justify antisemitism. All the names are self-explanatory. I may have to mute "israel" as well, but i don't want to do that. In spite of it all, I am interested in what's actually going on there; I just don't like the conversation surrounding it. Whether I do or not, hopefully I can still keep up with current events happening in the area. If not, I'll just have to find my news about it elsewhere. Doing this may seem to some that I'm taking myself out of the conversation. That I'm burying my head in the sand, trying to ignore a pretty massive problem of online hatred. Well, I'll say this: It's a massive problem on Twitter. But it's not up to me to clean it up. I don't want to leave Twitter, because there *are* actually people there with whom I share much in common. I'm just tired of seeing "the Jewish question" being brought up like it's 1940s Germany. I like talking about tech, and music, and movies, and art. I don't want to tell anyone else what they can or can't discuss, but I don't have to listen to any of the nonsense, either. Yes I can just turn off my phone and go outside. I already do. I run more than 60 km per week at this point. I also sometimes like to converse on Twitter. I want to enjoy it. I don't want it to make me angry and depressed.