You may recall that a month ago Elon Musk announced on X that he was considering a lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League.

To be super clear, I’m pro free speech, but against anti-Semitism of any kind

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 4, 2023

Our US advertising revenue is still down 60%, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 4, 2023

If this continues, we will have no choice but to file a defamation suit against, ironically, the “Anti-Defamation” League.

If they lose the defamation suit, we will insist that they drop the the “anti” part of their name, since obviously … 😂

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 4, 2023

This followed arguments between Musk and the ADL earlier this summer after Musk made some comments about George Soros.

In a tweet late Monday, Musk compared him to X-Men villain Magneto, who like Soros was a survivor of the Holocaust, according to the comics’ back story for the character. When a Twitter user defended Soros as having good intentions which are criticized by those who disagree with his politics, Musk responded, “You assume they are good intentions. They are not. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, a civil right group that tracks and battles incidents of antisemitism, criticized Musk’s comment and said it “will embolden extremists.”

Both the ADL and a group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate *CCDH” have claimed that “hate speech” has increased on X since Musk took over.

In one instance, the CCDH found the daily use of the n-word under Musk is triple the 2022 average and the use of slurs against gay men and trans persons are up 58% and 62%, respectively. The ADL said in a separate report that its data shows “both an increase in antisemitic content on the platform and a decrease in the moderation of antisemitic posts.”

Musk called the reports in May by the two watchdog groups “utterly false,” claiming that “hate speech impressions,” or the number of times a tweet containing hate speech has been viewed, “continue to decline” since his early days of owning the company when the platform saw a spike in hate speech designed to test Musk’s tolerance.

Twitter did in fact sue the CCDH in August:

The lawsuit filed Monday in San Francisco federal court accuses CCDH of deliberately trying to drive advertisers away from Twitter — recently rebranded as “X” — by publishing reports critical of the platform’s response to hateful content.

It specifically claims CCDH violated Twitter’s terms of service, and federal hacking laws, by scraping data from the company’s platform and by encouraging an unnamed individual to improperly collect information about Twitter that it had provided to a third-party brand monitoring provider.

The complaint accuses CCDH of engaging in a wide-ranging campaign to silence users of Twitter’s platform by calling attention to the views they post on social media.

So it really did seem like X and the ADL might be headed to court. But as of today, the situation seems to have cooled off. The ADL released a statement saying they believe X is serious about addressing antisemitism on the platform. They also said they will resume advertising there themselves.

“We appreciate X’s stated intent over the last few weeks to address antisemitism and hate on the platform. This has been useful; more needs to be done; and, as we have with other companies, in the spirit of collaboration, we are hopeful that we can continue to engage with X on this important matter.

“We want to do so because ADL fights antisemitism, hate, and extremism across all platforms and regardless of party or ideology. We attempt to work with each platform in a constructive manner. We engage with all of them routinely on how to make their platforms better.

“To be clear, any allegation that ADL has somehow orchestrated a boycott of X or caused billions of dollars of losses to the company or is “pulling the strings” for other advertisers is false. Indeed, we ourselves were advertising on the platform until the anti-ADL attacks began a few weeks ago. We now are preparing to do so again to bring our important message on fighting hate to X and its users.

The ADL posted a link to their statement on X and Elon responded by thanking them.

And also very much appreciate that ADL has bought advertising on 𝕏

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 4, 2023

So it seems that, at least for now, things have settled down.

My own take is that, despite being despised by about 95% of the professional media and left-wing activist class, Musk has been making some progress turning things around at X. Advertisers are returning and many of the progressives who said it was doomed to collapse are still around. Given time, X has the potential to grow substantially and even to become profitable as early as next year. If it happens, a lot of people who really wanted to see Musk fail are going to severely disappointed. But as long as they keep complaining about it on X, I guess that’ll be fine with Musk.