JTA — A “community note” saying falsely that Leo Frank, the victim of an antisemitic lynching in 1915, was guilty of raping and murdering a young girl appeared and disappeared several times over the weekend on X, the platform known until recently as Twitter.
Community notes, which allow users to contribute additional context about tweets, were expanded in late 2022 as new owner Elon Musk’s favored tool for battling misinformation on the platform. But the community note about Frank offers the latest indication that the technology can be misused.
The note was appended to tweets by the Anti-Defamation League and its CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, marking the anniversary of Frank’s lynching. The Jewish civil rights group was founded in the wake of the case.
TankTinker -1 points 1.2 years ago
Not exactly.
At around 10 pm on the night of August 16, 1915 a lynch mob consisting of twenty eight local men including Georgia Governor and the President of the Georgia Senate, the Mayor of Marietta, the County Sheriff , local tradesmen, a hangman and a lay preacher busted Frank out of Milledgeville State Penitentiary.
They handcuffed the Warden, cut the prison's telephone wires and drained the gas from their automobiles, they seized Frank and drove him on a 175 mile seven hour automobile trip to Marietta Georgia, and hanged him from the branch of a tree at around 7:00 am the following morning. Wikipedia.
We will say that once Frank's guilt had been established to reverse the charges so to speak, the Jews organized the lynching to swing the whole thing back in their favor, and then to by clinging to the fiction he was innocent convince the wider public Jews were the aggrieved parties.
Part of Leo Frank's defense was that the black security guard who discovered 13 yo Mary Phagan's body was her murderer, an assertion that was thrown out of court.