Social media applications, showing Twitter before it was changed to ‘X.’ Photo: Public Domain.

The evidence shows that X Corp., the platform formerly known as Twitter, has become a more antisemitic place since Elon Musk bought it. But instead of working to eliminate that Jew-hatred, he has deployed considerable company resources to conceal it. Since dismantling the internal bodies designed to protect vulnerable users, Musk has threatened, sued, and excluded the researchers studying both his impact on the platform and X’s impact on society.

The assault on transparency and accountability started quickly. Just six weeks after purchasing Twitter in late 2022, Musk disbanded Twitter’s Trust & Safety Council, an advisory group of more than 100 independent organizations convened to help the platform address issues like hate speech. His promise to replace it with a different group never materialized.

Even before then, however, Twitter had already implemented policies to prevent outside scrutiny.

I saw them in action firsthand last November. CyberWell, the nonprofit I founded as the first live database of online antisemitism, was in the market for social listening tools — technology that searches through large quantities of social media posts to provide insight on specific trends. We were ready to move forward with the vendor when they asked us what our organization did. I told them we track online antisemitism, and they immediately and apologetically refused to provide us their services.

It turns out that X explicitly prohibits hate researchers from using its data, even via commercial data vendors.

Musk’s campaign of opacity has only intensified since. The next shoe to drop came in February, with the implementation of a deceptively familiar feature.

It all started with a paywall. As it hemorrhaged money, Twitter attempted to boost its revenue by implementing a monthly pricing model for third parties accessing its public data. Yet unlike its better-known blue check (Twitter Blue) feature, the data paywall was designed to be prohibitively expensive.

Twitter’s cheapest plan costs $42,000 a month, while its top tier runs more than $2.5 million per month, for access to about two percent of daily tweets. Since a billion tweets are posted every day, two percent might seem like a lot — but prior to the paywall, accessing ten percent of those tweets cost just $500 a month.

As soon as Twitter announced the move, researchers warned that the new prices would hamstring their ability to study Twitter, its user behavior, and its impact on everything from fashion trends to hate crimes.

Antisemitism-focused scholars and nonprofits like CyberWell were especially concerned given Twitter’s preexisting underinvestment in fighting antisemitic content, and our apprehensions were justified.

In the past month, X sued both a nonprofit whose research demonstrates X’s inaction on hate content, and an Israeli data provider that offers pro-bono datasets to hate researchers.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) published a report in June revealing that X took no action on 99% of reported hate content posted by Twitter Blue subscribers. Posts with language like “The Jewish Mafia wants to replace us all with brown people,” or “Diversity is a codeword for White Genocide,” were not removed, nor were the responsible accounts taken down.

X’s new lawsuit disputes CCDH’s findings and alleges that their data was cherrypicked — an odd accusation from the very entity trying to bar CCDH from accessing that data in the first place.

Bright Data was sued by both X and Meta, in part for their Bright Initiative, which provides nonprofits, academics, and public bodies free access to large open-source datasets. The complaints bizarrely claim that the public data that Bright Data collects is somehow proprietary — despite Meta having hired Bright Data for the exact data scraping service that is the focus of their lawsuit.

If this sounds like multibillion-dollar corporations are using their legal and financial muscle to bully people and groups, it should. Money that civil society organizations and scholars spend defending themselves in court is money not being spent on research and core missions, which social media companies surely know.

We cannot effectively understand modern antisemitism without access to good data from social media platforms. Online antisemitism is the fastest-growing form of Jew-hatred, and its role in the manifestation of real-world violence is still being explored.

If Congress sees it proper to continue granting social media platforms immunity for the hate content they host via Section 230, NGOs and hate scholars should be awarded reciprocal legal protection from lawsuits like those filed by X, as well as protected access to API-based tools that social media platforms sell for exorbitant profit to third party vendors.

Musk may have decided that it’s cheaper to cover up inconvenient facts than change them, but that strategy is not sustainable for X, the Jewish community, and anyone looking for a safer online environment.

Once you kick the canary out of the coal mine, everyone is at risk.

Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, Adv. is an American Israeli and the founder and CEO of CyberWell – the world’s first open database dedicated to fighting online antisemitism across social media platforms, available at app.cyberwell.org.