Personally, I Prefer Having Fewer Nazis on Twitter

Like pretty much any journalist who compulsively wastes too much of their life on Twitter, I’ve had my fair share of unpleasant experiences with the site. In part, that’s because I’m Jewish, and I occasionally find my mentions flooded by antisemitic trolls who think it’s the height of wit to throw an echo around my name—as in “we see you (((weissmann)))”—in response to some tweet they don’t like. It’s a hazard of the site that you learn to live with.

Thankfully, Twitter’s Nazi problem has felt a little less severe in recent years. Back during the 2016 election, when Donald Trump’s first run for the White House helped turn social media into a white supremacist jamboree, having some anonymous groyper tell me to jump in an oven was just another day at the office. These days, something I say really has to go viral and reach a large swath of right-wing accounts before the bigoted shitposters start to show up in numbers.

Suffice it to say, I’m feeling a little bit apprehensive about what exactly Elon Musk plans to do with Twitter, assuming he actually closes his deal to buy the company. The Tesla and Space X founder describes himself a free speech “absolutist” and has regularly criticized the site’s content moderation practices for supposedly trampling on discourse. There’s now a widespread assumption he’ll try to loosen those policies.