Through much of August, the present month, a neonazi whom I’ve assumed to be one person has been a feature of my daily experience on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Excuse me if I don’t screenshot their work for you to see. Their posts are mainly cartoons of the ‘happy merchant’ a cartoon figure on social media representing Jews according to Nazi iconography: a bearded man wearing a kippah, always rubbing his hands while wearing a cunning yet fearful expression. As with the illustrations of Der Stürmer in Nazi Germany and its forerunners elsewhere in Europe and America, the Jewish character is always shown engaged in some act of deception or exploitation. These cartoons, along with idealized photos of Hitler, pictures of gas canisters and references to what he calls the ‘Shoax’ – elision of Shoah and hoax, obviously – appear regularly in my notifications and those of other Jewish people active on X as we must now call Twitter.

It has become a grotesque game in which I call for the neonazi account to be reported; it gets reported; after a day or several days, it gets locked or suspended by Twitter Support; within a few hours it reappears with a new user name, sometimes just a minimally tweaked version of the previous name. For their user name, they opt usually for a letter of the alphabet followed by a string of digits. Being created anew so to speak every day, they have zero followers, sometimes acquiring one or two followers during the ephemeral Twitter life of each of their accounts. Clearly, they are present not to win friends and influence people but to show individual Jews, eg myself, that they can express open and violent racism and neither I not Twitter can stop them doing so. I have likened their tweets to me as the jump scare moment in horror films: they appear when I think they have gone.

Of course I no longer think they are gone. I know they will be back every day.

When Twitter locks an account, the tweets remain visible, unless the person complies with Twitter requirements by deleting the offensive posts. An account may be locked and kept on the back burner, so to speak. If suspension occurs, the account will be gone, except that, in the present case, they have a new one ready to go, with a new user name. As far as I understand it, they would need to create a new email address for each new account. As for IP numbers by which a user theoretically might be identified, there are ways of getting round this which I can’t get my head round.

I imagine that it should not be beyond the wit of Twitter or X to have a system less hospitable to aggressive neonazis and racists. I am always hoping that someone might work out how Twitter could manage this and that Twitter/X itself would be willing to invest in a support system which would act more stringently against hate speech. Some say it is in the interests of social media to promote adversarial content. I am inclined to think it would just be too difficult and time consuming for them to attempt to contain it.

Otherwise I shall have to look at Julius Streicher type cartoons and fan pics of Hitler whenever I click on my notifications or alternatively, to Jexit at last from the platform.

Post script

Since I wrote the piece above, the person has been suspended and returned many times. I say ‘the person’ because of the modus operandi, the linked Twitter handles, adjusted by a sequential letter or a change of digits, but of course it may be several persons, unconnected by anything other than their steadfast Hitlerphilia. The person who tweeted to me ‘Don’t forget to die Kike,’ did not go against Twitter’s safety rules I was informed and yet, minutes later, I was pleased to see the account has been suspended. Minutes after that, the Hitlerphile returned with an adjustment to their user name, to assure me that there is no seeing them off of the Twitter platform.

They have left their calling card again. They must consider it a win that they can carry on tweeting to Jews, with their Holocaust denial and Holocaust threats.

One year later, August 2024, they tweet to me as follows:

To another Jewish woman, they send these messages:

Are they a danger to their community in Colorado? I don’t know. I don’t know who they are.