Clayton pushed back, saying, “What I claimed was there are many organizations that say that kind of information is on the rise now, whether it has on my feed or not.” He cited a
report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in the U.K.
“People will say all sorts of nonsense, I’m literally asking for a single example and you can’t name one,” Musk said.
The back and forth continued with Musk calling it “absurd” that Clayton could not back up his claim with a single example.
Clayton ultimately noted the conversation was not “getting anywhere” and urged Musk to change topics.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue responded to the interview in a Twitter thread, pointing to their study that found a “sustained 2x rise in English-language antisemitic speech since Musk took over Twitter.”
The group’s report detected 325,739 English-language antisemitic tweets between June 2022 and February 2023. The weekly average number of antisemitic tweets increased by 106 percent, to 12,762 from 6,204, when comparing the period before and after Musk’s acquisition, according to the report. The report’s methodology “draws on a suite of natural language processing classifiers trained to identify antisemitic content in line with the [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s
definition of antisemitism], allowing us to identify messages at scale which can plausibly be categorised as hate speech.”