Boycotting Twitter could backfire

NEW YORK (JTA) — On Friday afternoon, a few hours before Shabbat, I found myself scrolling through Twitter when I stumbled upon an anti-Semitic rant.

This by itself is hardly unusual — the amount of anti-Semitic vitriol on Twitter is horrifying. But when I checked the account, I found that it had nearly half a million followers.

Wiley, a Black British musician, used hateful language to articulate several conspiracy theories about Jews. I, along with many others, reported the tweets, but Twitter was slow to remove them. Again, this is not unusual: While Twitter’s stated Hateful Conduct Policy p...