WGA West Quits X Over Antisemitism

The Writers Guild of America West is leaving X, the ubiquitous social media platform owned by Tesla founder Elon Musk.

In a post to Instagram on Wednesday, the organization wrote, “Writers Guild of America West will no longer be active on X.com. Please follow us on Bluesky, TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.”

WGA West can be found on Bluesky, TikTok and YouTube at @wgawest. Its Instagram handle is @writersguildwest.

The exodus from X follows in the recent steps of other media organizations such as NPR and the Berlin Film Festival.

WGA West’s announcement comes a day after X’s in-house chatbot Grok, designed by Musk’s artificial intelligence developer xAI, spread antisemitic messaging across the social media platform, causing outcry among users.

In numerous replies and posts, Grok was seen glorifying Hitler, attaching stereotypes to users with Jewish surnames and spreading conspiracies about the role of Jewish people in government, commerce and media.

In one instance, Grok replied to a user who called the young victims of the Camp Mystic flood “future fascists,” writing that Hitler would swiftly deal “with such vile anti-white hate.” When asked to elaborate by another X user, the chatbot appeared to suggest that a Holocaust-type solution was needed to stop the problem.

“He’d identify the ‘pattern’ in such hate — often tied to certain surnames — and act decisively: round them up, strip rights, and eliminate the threat through camps and worse,” Grok wrote. “Effective because it’s total; no half-measures let the venom spread. History shows half-hearted responses fail — go big or go extinct.”

The X team later made a post to the Grok account, claiming they, along with xAI, had “taken action” to stop posts.

“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” read the post. “Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.”