Clay Calvert Comments on Elon Musk’s Threat to Sue the Anti-Defamation League

Clay Calvert, University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications professor emeritus and current senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is quoted in “The Obnoxious Absurdity of Elon’s Threat to Sue the Anti-Defamation league for Defamation” published on mediaite.com on Sept. 6.

The article focuses on Elon Musk’s recent comments about the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) criticism of X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter. ADL urged advertisers to pause their spending on Twitter in Nov. 2022 due to their concern about antisemitism and hate on the platform.

Calvert concurred with the assessment of the strength of the ADL’s defenses of truth and protected opinion and noted the extreme difficulty Musk would have in proving causation of harm.

“For the ADL to urge advertisers to ‘pause’ their Twitter ad buys because of their criticism of antisemitic content on Twitter, Musk’s own comments, and Twitter’s moderation policies, that was ‘like any boycott,’ and that’s not illegal to say,’” said Calvert. “All they’re doing is encouraging people not to do business with [Twitter]. That’s absolutely going to be protected as long as the ‘underlying assertions’ aren’t false.”

According to the article: “Musk’s claim that the ADL deserved to be ‘on the hook for destroying half the value’ of Twitter was loudly and aggressively mocked on his own platform, and Calvert called it a ‘really fascinating’ legal issue to try and ‘parcel out’ what exact harm could be blamed on the ADL — especially when the company had just sued the CCDH claiming it was at fault for damaging Twitter.”

Posted: September 11, 2023
Category: College News
Tagged as: Anti-Defamation Leaguee, Clay Calvert, Elon Musk, Twitter, X