By John Friend
Following the purported mass shooting at a Buffalo, N.Y. supermarket on May 14, a coalition of civil rights organizations led by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is demanding that top social media companies censor and deplatform popular conservative commentators such as Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and others who report and comment on mass immigration, White demographic diminishment and replacement, and other controversial topics that they argue influenced the young man who allegedly carried out the shooting.
Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old recent high school graduate from New York, purportedly committed the mass shooting at a Tops supermarket, killing 10 Black people while injuring three more. Officials claim that Gendron was motivated by racial animus and the idea of the Great Replacement, which posits that Whites are being replaced in countries that their ancestors founded and built through a combination of mass immigration and low birth rates, policies that are championed by a hostile ruling elite.
The mass media and activist organizations such as the ADL characterize the Great Replacement as an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theory,” despite the reality of diminished White demographics and replacement level migration in virtually every Western nation, including the United States and much of Europe. Declining White demographics in America are often praised and celebrated by popular pundits, political commentators, comedians, politicians, and others.
Stop Hate for Profit, a coalition of civil rights organizations including the ADL, the NAACP, Color of Change, National Hispanic Media Coalition, and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), released a press statement on May 26 demanding that the world’s top social media platforms “immediately stop the spread of hateful white supremacist rhetoric that has incited acts of violence by permanently banning repeat perpetrators like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and others from their platforms.” They also demand that these platforms rigorously enforce “their own hate speech policies with regard to the Great Replacement theory and white supremacy.”
“As a coalition of storied civil rights organizations and advocacy groups, we are deeply saddened and alarmed by the racist murders in Buffalo on May 14, and we grieve for families of the victims,” Stop Hate for Profit leaders explained in the press release. “The tragic killing of 10 people in New York was motivated by the racist and hateful replacement theory that has spread like wildfire through mainstream social media and is amplified to millions of viewers on cable TV channels. It is time for social media platforms to shut hate speech down.”
The group specifically called on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Discord, and Reddit to ban Carlson and others addressing the Great Replacement reality, which they view as a “racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.”
Carlson, who hosts one of the most popular cable news television programs in America, uses social media “as a megaphone to push conspiracy theories and racist content that legitimize and provoke violent acts of white supremacism in the United States,” the group argues.
Below are the specific actions Stop Hate for Profit is demanding the world’s top social media platforms take:
The ADL has repeatedly targeted Carlson in the past and regularly demands that pro-White advocates and political dissidents be banned from social media and prevented from exercising their free speech rights.
We're calling on @Meta, @instagram, @YouTube, @reddit, @discord, @twitch & @Twitter to stop the spread of deadly #WhiteSupremacist hate by removing content that pushes the racist #GreatReplacementTheory & bans repeat perpetrators like @TuckerCarlson. https://t.co/PJlWlnRp9I
— ADL (@ADL) May 26, 2022
Deborah Lipstadt, a former Holocaust scholar and Jewish activist who was recently sworn in as the anti-Semitism envoy for the Biden administration, also commented on the alleged Buffalo shooting, denouncing the Great Replacement “conspiracy theory.”
In a keynote address delivered to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations held at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, Lipstadt explained that the shooting was yet another expression of anti-Semitic and racist hatred fueled by those discussing the Great Replacement.
“Many people were shown the horrific impact of the Great Replacement Theory in the Buffalo shooting,” Lipstadt stated, before noting that anti-Semitism and racism are “ubiquitous, free-flowing and moving in and coming from all directions” in America.
President Biden's antisemitism monitor Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt @StateSEAS gave her first ever keynote address in New York at @MJHnews.
Here she discusses the Buffalo shooting and how racism and antisemitism are linked together. pic.twitter.com/eh5jApa9Ke
— Jacob Henry (@jhenrynews) May 26, 2022
Stop Hate for Profit has previously organized campaigns to influence social media companies, which have largely amounted to specific demands that platforms censor speech and content that the coalition of civil rights organizations does not approve of. In March, the group demanded social media companies “immediately remove Russian state media and their amplifiers” in the wake of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine.
