Is the combative entrepreneur fanning the flames of far-right politics or is he just “an angry man screaming into a hurricane”?
Already a subscriber?Shortly after Elon Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter in April 2022, the billionaire entrepreneur tweeted that for the social media platform “to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally”.
In the US, Musk has thrown his full weight behind Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, hosting a gushing, two-hour interview with the Republican candidate last week and pitching himself as an adviser in a potential Trump White House., just hours after posting a meme directed at Breton urging him to “literally f--- your own face”.To his enthusiastic supporters, Musk is a truth-teller willing to defend freedom of speech no matter how unpopular.
This year, Musk has increasingly inserted himself into political events at home and abroad. Shortly after the assassination attempt on Trump, Musk publicly endorsed the former president for the first time, and has since said he has contributed to a pro-Trump super PAC.For years, Republicans complained that social media platforms more broadly were biased against conservative voices. Now, Democrats are the ones complaining.
“One of the first things that Musk did was remove and lay off whatever infrastructure existed for some transparency into how Twitter was making decisions and what its community guidelines were and how it is being enforced,” says New_ Public’s Pariser. In the US, ahead of the November vote, some experts warn that Musk’s tendency to share what they deem to be baseless election misinformation or conspiracy theories in particular could be harmful to the democratic process.The Centre for Countering Digital Hate last week found that election claims from Musk that it deemed to be “misleading” – including allegations of Democrats “importing voters” and an AI “deepfake” clip of Harris – had been viewed 1.
“What I’m most worried about is Elon turning up the rhetoric and heat in a way that could lead to offline violence,” says Harbath, also a former Meta public policy director. Meanwhile, researchers at the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University have found that extremist groups have viewed Musk’s takeover as an opportunity to rejoin the platform en masse.In one report, the Institute found X hashtags in Ireland being used to mobilise anti-immigration demonstrations, just months before public unrest and rioting erupted in the capital.
X’s global user numbers are 359 million, according to data from Emarketer, compared with more than 2 billion at Meta’s Facebook.
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