X: Holocaust remembrance organizations quit platform

Multiple institutions and individuals involved in Holocaust education, remembrance and research silenced their X accounts on Friday, joining an ongoing exodus from the social media platform owned by tech billionaire-turned-Trump policy 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 nonprofit that provides social and welfare services to Holocaust refugees and survivors, as well as Holocaust education.

In an initiative statement, the AJR lamented the changes that have taken place since Musk's takeover of the platform formerly known as Twitter in October 2022.

"Misinformation, distortion and abuse have flourished while security and content moderation measures have all but disappeared," the statement reads. "Meanwhile, as a business, X relies on our content to keep its users engaged. More engagement means more advertising revenue. Simply put, X profits from our presence there — it profits from each word we post. 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 UK and Germany, had joined the initiative. The participants also pledged to support one another's content on other social media platforms.

The initiative participants are joining newspapers, football clubs, major nonprofits and individuals  leaving X for alternative options, with significant numbers deactivating their accounts after the November 6 reelection of Donald Trump.

A decision long in the works

The AJR's decision to leave X was a yearlong evolution rather than the result of a certain tipping point, Alex Maws, the organization's head of education and heritage, explained. A pivotal moment, however, was when Musk shared an endorsement of the "great replacement" theory — a racist, antisemitic common among far-right extremists and white supremacists.

"That was the thing that caught a lot of people's attention ... seeing [how] that was actually just one example of [how] the site was a platform that didn't just tolerate abuse and misinformation but ... seems to be promoting it, pushing it to people who were not looking for anything," Maws told DW, pointing out that no one knows how the X algorithm works.

Maws and the AJR feel that the disinformation, misinformation and abuse abounding on X now outweigh the benefit of trying to reach and educate audiences on the platform. He decided to share the decision to leave X and reached out to the field's professional network to "embolden others to do something that might feel a bit risky in today's communication environment." 

In reaction to the collective decision to leave X, various individuals have accused Maws and his association of organizing a "political campaign" and a "left-wing plot," but the campaign has nothing to do with Musk's politics, Maws stressed.

"It's very important to say that antisemitism knows no permanent political home," he said. "This really has nothing to do with Musk's alignment with President-elect Trump. There are probably corporate executives with whom many of us disagree all across the corporate sector, but we don't necessarily disengage from their products or their platforms, because those views don't necessarily impact upon them."

Joining the call in Germany

The AJR's initiative reached and resonated with the House of the Wannsee Conference (GHWK), in Berlin's southwestern suburbs, which also signed on to the initiative. Today a Holocaust educational and memorial, the villa was the location of a conference in January 1942 during which Nazi political and military officials discussed the implementation of the "final solution" — the state-sanctioned deportation and murder of Jews across Europe.

Employees there had also been talking for around a year about leaving X; they have been using Bluesky, a popular alternative, alongside X since last October. 

"We really wouldn't have needed a campaign or a call [to leave]," said Eike Stegen, the GHWK's press relations officer. "We had reached a point in our internal discussions where we said 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 in our field as possible to leave the platform with us."

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

Stegen is confident that they will be able to reach an audience on alternative platforms. "But even if this isn't the case and we lose some resonance, we think it's worth it," he said.

Responsibility toward Holocaust survivors, descendants

Stegen would have liked to see greater international reach with the initiative, since, as he explained, "social media platforms rely on the creation of a social environment where you can be heard and communicate with others."

Maws is clear that he does not judge anyone for remaining on X. "People and organizations need to make these decisions based on their own strategic goals and if being on X, still serves those goals, great," he said. 

For the AJR, however, which was founded by Holocaust refugees and survivors, the issue was one of responsibility: Would those founders and their descendants want us to share their history, legacy and stories "on a website that was seemingly, as part of its business model — as a feature, not a bug — promoting antisemitism, disinformation, Holocaust distortion and hatred more generally? It just feels like it's not appropriate for a charity such as ours to be contributing to that environment." 

Edited by: Elizabeth Grenier