IBM, a major advertiser on X, has pulled its spending from the social media platform, whose employees are grappling with what to tell its other advertisers, according to internal messages.
To be clear: Musk endorsed a tweet which used a false antisemitic conspiracy theory to tell people why “Hitler was right”
I don’t think that’s right, context matters. It spreads when it is shared uncritically and people come across it in a context where they don’t have their guard up. I believe it is preventative, to some extent, the other way around, when it is shared in a context ripping it to shreds.
People will come across antisemitism in the wild, and it is important that they learn to recognise it. This quote is pretty extreme, but it is important that people know that antisemites use words like e.g. “dialectical” as a dog whistle. The next time they hear someone say something about it when one of their facebook friends share something they might notice that they talk about “Hollywood elites” or whatever in the same way.
Without a good understanding of how antisemitism works we are all susceptible.
So I had to look up ‘dialetical’ to get it’s meaning as “logically constructed through argument and counter argument”. Why is that a dog whistle?
Yeah, it is also just a philosophy word. But antisemites use it to refer to “dialectical materialism”, which is a real term for Marxist philosophy, but by which they mean “cultural Marxism”, a thing they made up by which they in turn mean “the Jews are going to impose communism on us through psyops that convince us it is good, so we have to exterminate them.”
Basically, like much of their coded language, it is a reference to a conspiracy theory.