Lorraine Ali: Elon Musk's courtship with MAGA has driven X into misinformation abyss

Lorraine Ali, Los Angeles Times on Oct 11, 2024

Published in Op Eds

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Multibillionaires are eccentric. It's common knowledge, like water is wet, fire is hot, "Joker: Folie à Deux" is a terrible film.

From Jeff Bezos to Peter Thiel to Richard Branson to Howard Hughes (adjusting for inflation), they do weird things: shoot themselves into space, invest in treatments to "cure" aging, buy islands and wash their hands a lot.

It's rare that the other 99.9% of us are directly exposed to their world-ownership whims, though we indirectly suffer the consequences of their rocket ship carbon emissions, self-serving super PACS and failure to pay taxes.

Elon Musk, however, is a different story.

Since the Tesla and Space X owner purchased Twitter (now X) in 2022 for $44 billion, he's assumed the mantle of "free speech" warrior. I put free speech in quotations because we're not talking about the kind of free speech people fight and die for under dictatorships or theocracies.

Musk's idea of "freedom" is amplifying hate speech, sowing misinformation, stoking conspiracies, propping up nationalists in places like India and Argentina, and complying with censorship requests from authoritarian regimes like Turkey's.

As for our presidential race here at home, Musk's misleading election claims on X were viewed 1.2 billion times between January and July of this year, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Then there's the creepy posts, like the one aimed at Taylor Swift after she endorsed Kamala Harris on Instagram, and signed off as "Childless Cat Lady." "Fine Taylor … you win," Musk wrote on X last month. "I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life." Gross.

Musk recently amplified the false claims and conspiracy theories that Federal Emergency Management Agency officials were "actively blocking" relief shipments to victims of Hurricane Helene, "seizing goods … and locking them away to state they are their own."

Musk also propagated the politically motivated MAGA-verse lie that FEMA was short on funds because it had spent too much on undocumented migrants. He accused the agency of "treason" and wrote incorrectly that the agency "used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives." So much for helping fellow Americans in their time of need.

The richest man in the world instead used his megaphone to lie to disaster victims, telling them that help was not on the way. The false information dovetailed with election propaganda benefiting the Trump campaign.

Musk's propensity to align himself with chaos monkeys on the far right would still be unfortunate, but far less damaging if his leanings weren't also dictating policy for the nearly 200 million daily X users worldwide.

Since Musk's purchase of Twitter, he's made it harder to identify which accounts are trustworthy thanks to selling the blue "verified" check mark rather than vetting users to see whether they truly are who they claim to be.

X subsequently began sharing ad revenue with its "premium" users, so users get paid by advertisers for their engagement. And guess which posts garner the most attention? Sensational fabricated news, troll attacks, and hateful racist/sexist/homophobic rhetoric.

He also reinstated formerly banned accounts, such as that of professional misogynist Andrew Tate, rapper Kanye West, who was deplatformed for his antisemitic tirades, and Donald Trump.

Pre-Musk, when X was Twitter, the social media platform was often referred to as a "global town square." It was a place to check for the latest on a fast-moving news cycle, and much of the media used the platform to push out breaking stories or circulate their work because Twitter was often faster than news platforms and gave their stories more exposure.

If X is a town square, it's inundated with a right-wing mob marching unpoliced through otherwise crowded streets. And Musk is their cheering benefactor.

Earlier this week, Musk declared that the super PAC he created is offering $47 to anyone who registers as a swing-state voter and signs a petition supporting the 1st and 2nd Amendments to the Constitution. "Easy money!" he posted.

Musk showed up at Trump's rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last weekend clad in a black MAGA hat, and declared, "I'm not just MAGA; I'm Dark MAGA." It was a reference to a "Terminator" meme embraced by the far right. He then encouraged people to vote, saying that if they don't, "this will be the last election."

Also wearing a too-small T-shirt that read "Occupy Mars," Musk began hopping up and down — thus launching countless memes — to show his enthusiasm for the man he's backing in the election. It was awkward, to say the least.

Even Trump looked annoyed.