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Elon Musk welcomes antisemite Nick Fuentes back to Twitter
Social network owner expects to lose advertising revenue as he reinstates account of Jew hater on ‘free speech’ grounds
May 5, 2024 11:57
Social network owner expects to lose advertising revenue as he reinstates account of Jew hater on ‘free speech’ grounds
May 5, 2024 11:57Antisemitic Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes has been allowed back onto Twitter/X after his account was suspended following a barrage of conspiratorial and anti-Jewish posts.
Anti-racism watchdog, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which describes Fuentes as a “white supremacist leader” who has “united disparate groups within what was until recently known as the alt right,” said on Friday morning: “We are concerned that white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes may be officially welcomed back on X.”
Musk replied to that post, saying the “ADL is still fighting yesterday’s battles,” to which Fuentes argued: “ADL lost, Patriots won.”
X boss Elon Musk said on Thursday that Fuentes’s account “will be reinstated, provided he does not violate the law, and let him be crushed by the comments and Community Notes. It is better to have anti whatever out in the open to be rebutted than grow simmering in the darkness.”
Musk added, “I cannot claim to be a defender of free speech, but then permanently ban someone who hasn’t violated the law, no matter how much I disagree with what they say.
“This will probably cause us to lose a lot of advertisers and makes me sad, but a principle is a principle,” he said on the social media platform he bought in 2022 and renamed from Twitter.
When Fuentes’s account was reinstated on Saturday he tweeted, “I look forward to reintroducing myself in my own words!”
A notorious far-right commentator, Fuentes has advocated for the genocide of “perfidious Jews” and said in 2023, "they need to be given the death penalty, straight up."
The antisemite praised Hitler in 2023 as “really f*cking cool”. He added that “this guy’s awesome, this guy’s cool.”
He said, “All I want is revenge against my enemies and a total Aryan victory.” During a 2022 white nationalist conference, he favourably compared President Vladimir Putin to the Nazi leader: “Now, [the media is] going and saying, ‘Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler,’ as if that isn’t a good thing”.
Along with his antisemitism, Fuentes has said rape is “not a big deal,”
He gained further prominence when he joined the presidential campaign of antisemitic rapper Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and had dinner with Ye and former President Donald Trump in 2022.
Fuentes was first banned from Twitter in 2021 for “repeated violations”of the platform’s policies on hateful content. Reddit, Spotify, TikTok and YouTube also banned him, and Fuentes blasted a “concerted effort by leftists, conservative inc gatekeepers and silicon valley censors to silence” him.
He was briefly returned to the platform by Musk in January 2023. The far-right commentator flooded his feed with antisemitic posts and was suspended again from X within the day.
Hate speech watchdogs have warned against extremists on social media and have advocated for deplatforming.
Speaking out against antisemitism on a recent trip to Auschwitz, Musk has repeatedly said he is committed to absolute free speech.
Fuentes thanked the X chief, tweeting, “Thank you @elonmusk for reinstating my account and upholding your commitment to free speech.”
The same day Musk said he would restore Fuentes he proposed a poll vote on deporting people who remove the American flag to fly another in its place. He has also previously threatened to sue the ADL, who have since praised him for saying he would ban two phrases common to pro-Palestinian protests — “decolonization,” and “from the river to the sea.”