The nonprofit organization Secure Community Network, which provides safety consulting and training for Jewish facilities across North America, wrote a letter on Monday to Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, imploring him to clamp down on antisemitic content that could endanger lives.
“Twitter has an antisemitism problem — with hashtags such as #holohoax [Holocaust Hoax] and #killthejews abounding on the site,” Michael Masters, the group’s national director and chief executive, wrote in the letter.
The group is made up of many former law enforcement officials, including Mr. Masters, who was the chief of staff at the Chicago Police Department. It gave Mr. Musk five recommendations to improve Twitter and the safety of Jewish people, including hiring and training moderators to identify antisemitic content, removing it from the platform and closing user accounts that promote violent extremism.
Officials at the nonprofit say they have observed a swell of online posts expressing hate toward or conspiracy theories about Jewish people in the last few years. The organization touches 90 percent of the 7.2 million Jews across North America, Mr. Masters said, providing security training and coordination to synagogues, Hillel groups and other Jewish facilities.
Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, assumed control of Twitter on Thursday after promising for months to loosen the app’s content moderation standards. He appeared to take a step back from that anything-goes approach last week, telling Twitter advertisers on Thursday that the platform “cannot become a free-for-all hellscape.” On Friday, he vowed to form a content moderation council to make decisions about which posts are acceptable and which should be deleted.
But a coordinated antisemitic campaign hatched on the anonymous, fringe message board 4chan migrated to Twitter on Friday, spreading antisemitic memes and images on the platform, according to an analysis by the Anti-Defamation League.
Mr. Masters said the spread of antisemitism on Twitter imperiled Mr. Musk’s vision for making the social media platform a town square for all.
“You can’t have a digital town square if a significant part of the population feels they’re going to get lynched in it,” Mr. Masters said in an interview.
Mr. Musk and Twitter representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
In his letter, Mr. Masters told Mr. Musk that Twitter had played a “significant role” in creating what he called the most complex and dynamic set of threats against the American Jewish community in history, and he encouraged Twitter’s new owner to reverse that trend.
“This is not about the First Amendment,” Mr. Masters wrote. “And it is not about freedom. This violent speech must be monitored and policed like lives depend on it — because they do.”
