ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt Pushes for Stricter Social Media Policies, Fueling Free-Speech Debate”
November 11, 2025
You think you’re scrolling freely… but are you?”
Behind every trending topic and every ‘community guideline’ lies a web of power — boardrooms, lobbyists, and policymakers deciding what the world can and cannot see.
This isn’t just about likes and shares it’s about control. About how influenc)e is built, filtered, and fed back to billions of people every day.
When truth becomes negotiable and information becomes curated, freedom itself hangs in the balance.
Who’s pulling the strings behind the world’s biggest platforms? And what happens when the people stop asking?
#DigitalFreedom #QuestionEverything #MediaPower #OnlineInfluence #InformationControl #SocialMediaTruth #TransparencyMatters
English Script:
Interviewer: So I know we don’t have a lot of time, but I want to ask you, I mean, so much anti-Semitism is spread unchecked on social media. And there was a time when social media companies, let’s say, more aggressively policed these kinds of things. And I believe that they even sought the ADL advice on these things, sometimes depending on the company.
Jonathan Greenblatt: Yeah.
Interviewer: And then they kind of fell out of fashion. Let’s put it that way. What effort do you think the ADL and other organizations can make to try to combat the real, just like, cesspool of anti-Semitism online?
Jonathan Greenblatt: Well, let’s be honest. I mean, it’s sort of embedded in the question, like there’s no silver bullet.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Jonathan Greenblatt: So social media has sort of seized, you know, if you will, like the public conversation. And it’s now mediated through algorithms invisible to us but like manifest on our phones. So you and I could be sitting literally like on the same sofa in the same house, looking at our phones, getting two entirely different world views. You know, Steven Pinker has got this good new book about common knowledge. I think it’s a problem when common knowledge is exploded and where there’s no shared understanding of what like ground truth is for a lot of our young people, ground truth is ChatGPT, which itself is drawing information to its large Ai model from like Wikipedia and Al-Jazeera, like that is really troubling. If we are going to solve this problem, we need to get upstream, and we’ve got to figure out how to get these companies to do the right thing. Again, like you said, it’s kind of out of fashion these days for them to be policing. But look, I don’t think it’s cancel culture, not the platform masses. I don’t think it’s cancel culture, not the platform jihadists. So we would hope that they will do better in the future. And we’ve got a whole robust, sort of advocacy agenda like pushing and pushing and pushing, and we just got to keep at it. It can happen overnight. It’s not easy, but we can’t lose sight of these goals.
Interviewer: Are you optimistic about TikTok now that sort of an American conglomerate has bought part of the American operation?
Jonathan Greenblatt: Yeah. I mean, look, TikTok in my mind, I was not someone who believed that changing the ownership will necessarily affect the performance of the product. Case in point, Facebook, founded and owned by a Jewish man, Mark Zuckerberg, and really helped build by Sheryl Sandberg, the Jewish people, Instagram. I think one or both the founders Jewish Twitter, one of the founders Jewish. Like, I could go on. But the point is, is that all those guys were Americans and X and Insta are so damaging, I think, to the public conversation.
So I don’t think that the nationality of the ownership will necessarily make it better. The only way it gets better is if the ownership is committed to that outcome. And on that point, I got it. I’m optimistic. What else can we be?
