Holocaust memory organizations leave their platform – DW – 13/12/2024

Several institutions and individuals involved in Holocaust education, memory and research silenced their X accounts on Friday, joining a continuing exodus from the social media platform owned by tech billionaire turned Trump political adviser Elon Musk.

The coordinated departures are part of an initiative called “Not One More Word”, organized by the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), a UK-based non-profit organization that provides social services to refugees and survivors of the Holocaust, as well as education about the Holocaust.

In an initiative statement, the AJR deplored the changes that have occurred since Musk’s takeover of the former Twitter platform in October 2022.

“Disinformation, distortions and abuse have flourished while security and content moderation measures have all but disappeared,” the statement said. “Meanwhile, as a company, X relies on our content to keep its users engaged. More engagement means more ad revenue. Simply put, word we publish. We say NOT ONE MORE WORD.

As of December 12, 17 Holocaust-related organizations and 22 individuals involved in Holocaust research and writing, primarily in the United Kingdom and Germany, had joined the initiative. Participants also pledged to support each other’s content on other social media platforms.

Participants in the initiative join newspapers, soccer clubs, large nonprofits, and individuals who are leaving X for alternative options, and a significant number of them deactivated their accounts after Donald’s re-election Trump on November 6.

A decision long in the making

The AJR’s decision to leave A pivotal moment, however, was when Musk shared his support for the “Great Replacement” theory, a racist and anti-Semitic theory common among far-right extremists and white supremacists.

“That’s what caught a lot of people’s attention…seeing (how) this was actually just an example of (how) the site was a platform that not only tolerated abuse and misinformation, but… seems to be promoting it, offering it to people who weren’t looking for anything,” Maws told DW, emphasizing that no one knows how the X algorithm works.

Maws and the AJR believe that the misinformation, misinformation, and abuse that abounds on X now outweigh the benefit of trying to reach and educate the public on the platform. He decided to share his decision to leave X and reached out to the field’s professional network to “encourage others to do something that might seem a little risky in today’s communications environment.”

In response to the collective decision to leave Maws pointed out.

“It is very important to say that anti-Semitism has no permanent political home,” he said. “It really has nothing to do with Musk’s alignment with President-elect Trump. There are probably business leaders many of us disagree with in the corporate sector, but We don’t necessarily disengage from their products or platforms because those views don’t necessarily impact them.”

Join the call in Germany

The AJR initiative resonated with the Wannsee Conference House (GHWK), in the southwest suburbs of Berlin, which also signed on to the initiative. Now an educational site and Holocaust memorial, the villa was the site of a conference in January 1942 during which Nazi political and military leaders discussed the implementation of the “final solution”: the state-sanctioned deportation and murder of Jews across Europe.

Employees there had also been talking about leaving X for about a year; They’ve been using Bluesky, a popular alternative, alongside X since last October.

“We really wouldn’t have needed a campaign or an appeal (to leave),” said Eike Stegen, head of press relations at GHWK. “We had reached a point in our internal discussions where we were saying we wanted to leave the platform. But we wanted to join a campaign or a call because we wanted to motivate as many other accounts as possible in our field to leave the platform with us .

The AJR initiative is, in fact, the second exit campaign that GHWK has joined; on December 2, he announced that he was joining a German-organized campaign called #eXit.

Stegen is confident they will be able to reach audiences on alternative platforms. “But even if it doesn’t and we lose a little bit of resonance, we think it’s worth it,” he said.

Responsibility to Holocaust Survivors and Descendants

Stegen would have liked this initiative to have a greater international reach, because, as he explained, “social media platforms rely on creating a social environment where one can be heard and communicate with others” .

Maws is clear that he’s not judging anyone for staying on X. “People and organizations need to make these decisions based on their own strategic goals and if being on ” he said.

For the AJR, however, which was founded by refugees and survivors of the Holocaust, the question was one of responsibility: would these founders and their descendants want us to share their history, their heritage and their stories? on a website that apparently as part of its business model – as a feature, not a bug – promotes anti-Semitism, misinformation, distortion of the Holocaust and hatred in general? It just doesn’t seem appropriate for a charity like ours to contribute to this environment.

Edited by: Elizabeth Grenier