The new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, has fired many employees who were in charge of removing hate speech and conspiracy theory misinformation on the social media site. The result has been a dramatic increase in hate speech, especially that directed at Jewish people, minorities and LQBTQs.
There are concerns that the increase in hate speech allows extremist groups a platform for recruiting others and can lead to increases in violence.
“Elon said he wants Twitter to be a town square, but I don’t want to be in a town square with that much hate,” Rev. Blake Lasater of United Methodist Church said. “I think it is disturbing that as soon as Elon Musk lifted the restrictions, Twitter went from 300 instances of hate speech per day to more than 3,000. It is sad that Twitter is becoming a forum to lift up hate, including anti-Semitism and homophobia. I think Musk and others are legitimizing this hatred. Twitter is encouraging people to have these beliefs. They now feel it is okay to come forward. I think we need to be aware that a lot of people out there believe these false statements and we are not paying enough attention to them.”
In the past, society didn’t tolerate someone screaming fire in a crowded movie theater.
“Why are we suddenly going to tolerate people screaming such hatred on these online forums?” Lasater asked. “We also have warnings from the natural security agencies and the FBI that churches are targets of domestic violence because of this hate being put out. This is something we should all be concerned about.”
Rae Hahn is both Jewish and lesbian.
“So, they are after me from all sides,” she said. “It is concerning me, and I don’t know how to handle it except that I feel like in Eureka I am in something of a bubble protected from all this vitriol and hatred going on. I know this hatred runs deep, and the hatred of Jews has happened for 2,500 years. It is just a bad habit to blame everything on Jews.”
Hahn remembers being only six years old when she heard her mother rant and rave about Gerald L.K. Smith.
“When I moved here, I was in shock because I knew about this man from my mother, and here he was overlooking this town that I grew to love,” Hahn said. Smith, a racist Nazi sympathizer, was the founder of the Passion Play and is buried at the feet of the Christ of the Ozarks statue. A biography written by Glen Jeansonne is called Gerald L.K. Smith: The Minister of Hate.”
“I have to say that of all the different hats I have worn all my life, I am most closely attached to being Jewish,” Hahn said. “That is my first identity. I remember kids from the Catholic school chasing my sister home calling her a dirty Jew. My mother was very attuned to anti-Semitism, a lot of it because she heard stories of what happened to her mother who immigrated here in 1908 here from Russia. My grandmother remembers the Cossacks breaking her fingers because she was smelling a flower. They thought she was going to pick it.”
Hahn married a man born in Budapest whose mother was arrested and put in the Dachau concentration camp in 1944. She was 5 foot, ten inches, and only weighed 100 pounds when she got out. It is estimated that almost 32,000 people, mostly Jews, were murdered at Dachau.
“It adds to my feelings about the Holocaust deniers because I personally knew someone who was there and witnessed what happened,” Hahn said.
Hahn said hatred and bigotry is taught in homes. Now it is being spread around the world on forums like Twitter.
“I have concern about all this hatred of minorities and of women,” Hahn said. “The concern is there, but I don’t know what to do with it.”
Rabbi Rob Lennick, who formerly did services in Eureka Springs, said the rise of anti-Semitic behavior across society and especially online is obviously very disturbing to the Jewish community. The Anti-Defamation League estimates that in 2020, there were 17,000 tweets a week expressing sentiments like “Hitler was right.” By 2021, that number had doubled.
“Obviously, we can see that the veneer that used to exist against outwardly expressing racism, anti-Semitism and other hateful and threatening speech has come off because we live in the time when we have many unholy alliances between current and past political leadership and the leaders of extremist groups,” Lennick said. “We must take sides. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. We have a responsibility to stand up, speak out and make it very clear that if you are in Eureka Springs, or wherever you are, there is no place for hate.”
Out in Eureka Director Jay Wilks said they use Twitter to notify their followers of local events and communicate with other LGBTQ organizations.
“As far as it goes with the uptick in hate crimes, that is an issue,” Wilks said. “Everyone is entitled to free speech until it becomes threatening. I think what is happening on Twitter is taking us back to a scarier time. It is becoming another platform to incite violence against blacks, Jews, gays, Hispanics, etc. We have never received any threats from someone on Twitter, and I haven’t decided to get rid of the Twitter account at this time. I see a lot of weird stuff on Facebook, too.”
Dr. Joe Thompson, president and CEO of the Arkansas Center for Health Information, is concerned about a new spate of Covid conspiracy theories on Twitter, and that people with long Covid will seek out untrustworthy treatments recommended on social media.
“Unfortunately, there are too many snake oil salesmen selling unproven remedies that may not be helpful and could be harmful,” Thompson said. “Twitter had one of the most successful Covid misinformation monitoring strategies in place. They got recognized by the U.S. Surgeon General this past year. Their abandonment of that practice to help us all from not being affected by Covid misinformation is a shift of responsibilities from the social media platform to us. Nobody is watching out for us. So, I really encourage people not to use social media as a place to get healthcare information.”
Musk has reportedly lost $7 billion so far on the purchase of Twitter, but that may be small change to the richest man in the world, whose net worth is estimated at $181 billion. Some major advertisers have pulled their support. Twitter has lost an estimated one million users since Musk took over, according to the MIT Technology Review.
Musk may end up regretting his purchase of Twitter.
“Sorry that this is my first email to the whole company, but there is no way to sugarcoat the message,” Musk wrote to employees recently. “Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn.”