X CEO Elon Musk has claimed that social media could have prevented the Holocaust, and it would have been difficult to hide it if there had been freedom of speech.
Musk made the comments after visiting the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz in Poland on Monday. He made the claims during a discussion with commentator Ben Shapiro at the European Jewish Association annual conference in Krakow after his visit to the site.
“If there had been social media, I think [the Holocaust] would have been impossible to hide,” Musk said.
He added: “If there had been freedom of speech, as well. One of the first things the Nazis did when they came in is they shut down all the press and any means of conveying information”.
The images that have made it to social media platforms show Musk carrying his son on his shoulders.
The visit came months after X began receiving intense criticism for how it was tackling antisemitic content on the platform. The situation for Musk worsened after he endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory on X (formerly called Twitter).
He received intense criticism from all quarters in November last year for calling a post “the actual truth” that said Jewish communities advocated a “dialectical hatred against whites”.
This theory was one of the hateful ideas promoted by the gunman who killed eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 in one of the deadliest antisemitic attacks in US history.
Brands like Apple, Disney, and IBM paused ads on X soon after Musk made the comments backing the tweet. The company lost significant revenue. He later had to issue an apology for the same. “I’m sorry for that tweet or post,” Musk said. “It was foolish of me”. He described it as “one of the most foolish” things he had done on the platform.
However, Musk’s visit to the former Nazi death camp is being seen as an attempt to stop brands from fleeing the platform and to fix his image.
“Its just an apology tour for the advertisers…. when he comes back Twitter will be UnDone,” an X user commented.
“Elon with Twitter is more destructive than Kim Jung Un with nukes,” commented another.
His visit to Poland comes just a week before International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27. It is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in German-occupied Poland, where around 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, were murdered by the Nazis between 1940 and 1945.
