(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Twitter's rebirth as fascist propaganda outlet [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-21 It’s been almost a year since Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter, so it seems like a good time to take stock of how he has reshaped the platform into a fascist propaganda outlet over the past year and the simultaneous reshaping of his own reputation as part of that strategy. I won’t dig into the many controversial technical, administrative, and business changes that he ushered in at the same time. I have neither the time nor expertise to write a comprehensive description of the Musk/Twitter merger, but I hope this will be informative to those who have not been keeping up with this drama over the past year. Before getting into the events of the past year, let’s look at Twitter and Musk presented their social philosophies before his purchase of the company. Twitter grew into a major media player as “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” It attracted attention as a revolutionary tool to let regular people easily broadcast messages to the entire world. In some cases, Twitter bypassed the professional news media, but in many other it provided leads for professional journalists (though too often reporters lazily treated insignificant tweets as news in themselves). But at its heart, it was a Silicon Valley enterprise, meaning that profit was its priority and scale was its strategy. Free speech was balanced against other values that would keep stakeholders engaged — not just typical users and advertisers, but also influential ‘blue-checks’ who turned Twitter into a place that mattered outside of its own bubble. In the Trump era, government officials pressured Twitter to combat misinformation campaigns from hostile states and to promote more content by Republicans and their allies1. This culminated with President Trump being banned from Twitter in response to the January 6 riots that occurred after his incessant instigation of resistance to the 2020 election results. Through this period, Twitter weathered pushback with a combination of the network effect keeping people engaged and rationalizing their power as a mixture of technocracy and technolibertarianism. Musk came to prominence associated with another, overlapping philosophy that is popular in Silicon Valley — longtermism2. After cashing out of a couple of successful internet startups, Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the stated intention of enabling the colonization of Mars. He soon after became involved with Tesla and was the face of commercial efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, which was further boosted by his investments in Solar City, and his advocacy of rail development via the Boring company and his Hyperloop promotion. Through this period, Musk acquired a reputation for eccentricity and arrogance, but still worked to cultivate the image of a visionary entrepreneur who used his wealth for the betterment of humanity. He even encouraged other elites to redirect their conspicuous consumption in a more responsible direction. He also vocally opposed some of Trump’s bad policies, such as withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords and blanket immigration bans. I’d say his reputation started to turn as his behavior became increasingly erratic and antagonistic, and people tired of him hogging the spotlight (and investment funds) by constantly over-promising. For someone as powerful as him, his unprofessional behavior became increasingly concerning: he pointlessly insulted a diver working to rescue children trapped in a cave in Thailand (2018); he got stoned on the air with Joe Rogan (2018); he falsely posted on Twitter that he had secured funding to take Tesla private (2018); he boosted Dogecoin on Twitter (2020-21); and details emerged of how his breeding fetish birthrate concerns translated to his family life. Meanwhile, Tesla autopilot repeatedly got people killed, Hyperloop was revealed to as a ploy to scuttle high-speed rail in California, and the Boring Company showed that it was limited to producing gimmicky cut-rate tunnels suitable only for low capacity luxury vehicles. In this context, Musk started criticizing Twitter, suggesting that only he could be trusted to wield the power of that platform. His criticisms echoed insincere Republican talking points about ‘free speech’, but also spoke to justified suspicions about how Twitter directed attention to one post or another. I harbored some hope that Musk might actually have an idea of how to improve Twitter, but was skeptical that he could do much with his attention divided among multiple companies. Any hope of reasonable management was dashed during November 2022 when matched his promised loosening of restrictions on right-wing lies with a purge of antifascist writers. My stomach dropped when I saw Musk gleefully eliminating targets on Andy Ngo’s enemies list, openly allying with a man who gained fame as an intelligence agent for right-wing street-fighting gangs. This initial attack on ‘free speech’ was soon followed in December by his snap decision to ban flight-tracker accounts (e.g @Elonjet), followed by bans of several journalists whose reports on this decision included links to flight-trackers on other websites. This culminated in a short-lived policy change blocking links to any Mastodon instance or other places where ElonJet accounts could be accessed. All of this was happening as Musk organized the ‘Twitter Files’ PR stunt to raise a fuss about how the old Twitter moderators had banned accounts sharing Hunter Biden dick-pics that were taken from his abandoned laptop. Aside from using his editorial control to activate far-right accounts and ban their critics, Musk increasingly used his bully pulpit as the owner of Twitter to amplify bigoted conspiracy theories. Some of his bigoted remarks may just be unfiltered expressions of his personal frustrations, possibly encouraged by his desire to seem tough to the many bigots who follow him. But his writings about world events seem to be more considered, yet still likewise promote fascist attitudes. He endorsed the Republican party in 2022, by which point it was clear that the pro-Trump coup faction dominated the party; later on he endorsed the German party “Alternative for Deutschland”. On their own, these endorsements could be written off as evidence that Musk has fallen for the facade of reasonableness that the parties sometime present, but combined with his more specific commentary on government policy, it looks like he is really committed to promoting the illiberal agendas of these parties. He promoted the unfounded conspiracy theory that Anthony Fauci was involved in creating the SARS-CoV-2 virus. He suggested that we need a ‘modern day Sulla’, referring to a violent strongmen who sought to purify the Roman body politic. He fed the far-right’s ‘grooming’ paranoia as part of his denigration of the pre-Musk moderation program (which has not worked out too well for him). More recently, he’s picked up and amplified some classic antisemitic and anti-Black conspiracy theories, including the ‘great replacement’ and other myths of Jewish masterminds pulling strings to ruin those they envy. The problem here isn’t simply that Musk holds fascist attitudes; the problem is that he’s restructuring Twitter to make it a place where the far-right is eager to both read and write (for money). It’s possible that this repositioning of Twitter is a cynical business decision, but it’s also possible that profitability is a secondary concern for Musk, and instead he purchased Twitter primarily for the power it would give him to influence public discourse — after all, with assets worth $225 billion, he does not need Twitter to turn a profit. One thing that’s clear is that his professed commitment to free speech on Twitter is complete bullshit. For all the problems of mainstream media, the only solution offered by Musk and his right-wing allies is to amplify their own voices while silencing those who bother them, whether through control of publishers or through the threat of legal action. There are many other options out there that would accomplish the simple goal of neutral ‘end-to-end’ connectivity for everyone, but the right demands deference not equality, and rejects the notion that anyone else can wield power. With Musk’s takeover of Twitter, they have won a notable victory. Footnotes: 1. Twitter already preferentially amplified right-wing content 2. Longtermism has been described as second-generation eugenics, so you can imagine how it might dovetail with neo-fascist ideologies. Like eugenics, it prioritizes the interests of comfortable elites who have the means to reshape society over the interests of others with more pressing concerns of limited scope. Musk’s natalist fear-mongering also has echoes of white supremacist eugenics — after all, the global population is still rising rapidly. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/21/2200481/-Twitter-s-rebirth-as-fascist-propaganda-outlet?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/