Hiltzik: Elon Musk goes down the right-wing rabbit gap

Within the first days after his acquisition of Twitter on Oct. 27, Elon Musk rattled the platform’s customers and advertisers with a collection of tweets associating himself with far-right memes.

These included a grotesque conspiracy declare in regards to the violent assault on Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, and an accusation that “activist teams” had pressured advertisers into abandoning Twitter.

He invited former President Trump, who had been banned from Twitter for his help of the Jan. 6, 2021, rebellion, again onto the platform.

Though Musk deleted a few of his extra incendiary tweets, together with his obvious endorsement of the conspiracy principle relating to the assault on Paul Pelosi, they’ve turn out to be essentially the most generally cited indicators of his and the platform’s rightward swing.

But Musk’s newer tweeting is much more disturbing. He has overtly and approvingly engaged with among the most extremist far-right figures on the web, together with overt advocates for misogyny and white supremacy.

He has explicitly purchased into the right-wing Republican assault on “wokeness,” a fabricated criticism that’s the GOP’s means of demonizing range and inclusiveness.

Musk’s newest tweets embody the least inviting options of Twitter as a social media platform: petulance, truculence, a paranoid view of progressive or liberal insurance policies and a bent to enlarge essentially the most excessive viewpoints and attempt to make them seem mainstream.

Earlier than his takeover, Twitter workers struggled to curb these manifestations, with uneven success. Banning or suspending accounts for hateful tweets and for using antisemitic, racist and Nazi verbiage and imagery was a part of that course of.

By decimating Twitter’s traffic-moderating staff and granting a “basic amnesty” to beforehand suspended accounts, as he introduced can be executed beginning this week, Musk dangers making the location much less helpful and alluring to the overwhelming majority of customers.

Musk has continued to keep up that his purpose is to facilitate “free speech” on the platform — in impact, to energise {the marketplace} of concepts, the daylight that historically has been seen as a disinfectant in opposition to falsehood and corruption in American society, as Louis D. Brandeis put it in 1913.

In apply, nevertheless, Musk hasn’t paid greater than lip service to the idea. On Sunday, for instance, he tweeted a name for “individuals of various political or different views to engage in civil debate on Twitter.”

Solely an hour earlier than, nevertheless, Musk had attacked former Military Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who’s Jewish, utilizing an outdated antisemitic slur that depicts Jews as string pullers wielding secret affect over society and as instruments of the Israeli authorities. “Vindman is both puppet & puppeteer,” Musk tweeted. “Query is who pulls his strings…?”

In latest days, Musk has “more and more been selling far-right theories and white supremacist content material,” noticed Josh Marshall on his Speaking Factors Memo web site, the place he helpfully compiled among the most obtrusive examples.

Musk has purchased into the concept that Twitter has suppressed conservative viewpoints.

(Twitter)

The subtext of a lot of Musk’s tweeting could also be undetectable at first look by the typical reader, so it helps to offer perspective.

On Thanksgiving Day, he implicitly assented to a white supremacist’s reward for Twitter “reportedly nuking pedo accounts” and thereby “eliminating a lot of Antifa Twitter.” That tweet equated pedophilia with antifa, the decentralized motion focusing on fascism.

Musk responded, “Eradicating little one exploitation is precedence #1″ and requested the tweeter to inform him “in case you see something that Twitter wants to deal with.”

The unique message got here from Paul Ray Ramsey, who tweets beneath the deal with @ramzpaul. Because the Southern Poverty Regulation Middle has documented, Ramsey is a white nationalist who has labeled ladies’s suffrage a “most cancers” and questioned the historic fact of the Holocaust.

Yesterday, Musk implicitly endorsed a tweet by hacker Kim Dotcom accusing the Biden administration of advancing an immigration coverage that was a Democratic Occasion “voter farming technique” — that’s, rising the celebration’s voting base to “protect energy” by legalizing immigrants.

Musk responded, “Habits follows the incentives for political energy.” “Kim Dotcom” is the pseudonym of German-born Kim Schmitz, an accused web pirate who has been in New Zealand preventing extradition to the U.S. for years.

In response to a tweet depicting “Woke Propoganda” as a Computer virus led by “Woke lecturers” to assault “Child’s mind,” Musk tweeted again, “Precisely.”

Musk seems to have absolutely purchased into the right-wing view that as a public firm, Twitter had systematically suppressed conservatives and promoted progressive accounts.

“It has been actually unhealthy,” he tweeted on Nov. 23. “Far left San Francisco/Berkeley views have been propagated to the world by way of Twitter. I’m certain this comes as no shock to anybody watching intently. Twitter is shifting quickly to ascertain a good enjoying discipline. No extra thumb on the size!”

Two days later, he tweeted that “the woke mind virus has completely penetrated leisure and is pushing civilization in the direction of suicide. There must be a counter-narrative.”

What may account for Musk’s overt swerve to the far proper is unclear. Marshall compiled among the prevailing conjectures, his upbringing in apartheid-era South Africa and his connections with rightist Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel amongst them.

The underlying theme of these guesses is that Musk hasn’t moved proper, however for some motive feels empowered at this time to specific long-held opinions extra overtly.

It’s additionally conceivable that Musk craves validation and has discovered a pleasant, heat, moist spot amongst extremists who’ve come to view him as their hero. As John P. Moore of Cornell’s medical faculty informed me a couple of weeks in the past, in case you get embraced by fringe individuals and “have that psychological want for some type of affirmation from individuals you’re interacting with, it have to be very seductive.”

Regardless of the rationalization, Musk’s actions are unlikely to be something however disastrous for Twitter.

His mercurial temperament, particularly his obvious embrace of right-wing tropes and overt racists and antisemites, has predictably unnerved the advertisers on whom Twitter should rely for income to remain alive. It’s a uncommon client firm that will threat its advertisements showing on Twitter anyplace close to racist, misogynistic or antisemitic content material at this time.

No less than 50 of Twitter’s high advertisers within the pre-Musk interval have stopped or withdrawn their advertisements from Twitter, in accordance with a survey by the progressive group Media Issues for America. Most have withdrawn silently, however some have both publicly introduced the suspension of their campaigns or been reliably reported to have executed so, together with Ford, Jeep, Chipotle and Merck.

Musk initially tried to placate skittish advertisers by assuring them that he wouldn’t enable Twitter to turn out to be a “free-for-all hellscape” on his watch, and pledged to ascertain an impartial assessment council to make judgments about bans or suspensions of troublesome accounts.

He has since reneged, reportedly calling company executives to berate them for his or her recalcitrance and personally admitting previously banned tweeters again onto the platform, together with Trump and right-wing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).

In a Nov. 22 tweet, Musk asserted that he deserted his promise to create the moderation council as a result of “a big coalition of political/social activist teams agreed to not attempt to kill Twitter by ravenous us of promoting income if I agreed to this situation. They broke the deal.”

There’s no proof of any such settlement, and civil rights leaders who met with Musk across the time he introduced the council say they might by no means conform to something of the type.

Twitter continues to be the world’s main platform for the up-to-the-minute transmission of stories breaking on the bottom. Its worth for that objective has been on show in latest days, by the communication of protests throughout China over the regime’s draconian anti-COVID lockdowns.

If Twitter collapses due to Musk’s administration type, his insurance policies and his overt trafficking with producers of poisonous content material and commentary, one thing very helpful will likely be misplaced and nearly inconceivable to interchange, not less than within the close to time period.

Up to now, Musk hasn’t proven any consciousness of the injury attributable to his conduct to the platform he spent $44 billion — together with greater than $33 billion of his private fortune — to amass. That’s an issue, as a result of the one technique to convey advertisers again into the fold and shield Twitter’s function in public discourse is for Musk to vanish — to nominate a chief government with credibility within the social media discipline with customers and advertisers, and to cease tweeting himself.

If that have been to occur at this time or tomorrow, the restoration of Twitter to trustworthiness may start instantly.

However Musk already has made it inconceivable for that restoration to occur rapidly. And the indicators are pointing to his changing into much more smug and extra intemperate in his conduct. Simply within the final day or two he has tweeted an image of Pepe the Frog, a meme the Anti-Defamation League identifies as having racist and antisemitic connotations.

He has additionally picked a combat with Apple, which he says has threatened to “withhold” Twitter from its iPhone and iPad App retailer, although he says the large firm “received’t inform us why.” He tweeted that Apple has largely dropped its promoting on Twitter and requested, “Do they hate free speech in America?” He adopted up with a tweet directed at Apple’s CEO: “What’s happening right here, @tim_cook?”

(Really, the rationale Apple could be involved about Twitter is clear: Apple rigorously screens apps it gives customers to make sure they’re clear and hate-free. Musk’s insurance policies might not assure these qualities.)

Put all of it collectively, and issues are more likely to worsen earlier than they get higher on Twitter … in the event that they ever do get higher.