By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on November 11, 2022
Horrors will be seen. It’s no coincidence that Elon Musk put together his Twitter buyout show just before the U.S. midterm elections. It’s hard to swallow that the South African is behaving like Attila just out of sympathy for the likely Republican candidate for the 2024 election. The underlying plot here is not Trump liking; he is the Trump of Silicon Valley.
The idea that these two come from the same ideological stock is not new. Four years ago, after an outburst by Musk – he called the diver who saved 13 Thai children trapped in a cave a pedophile – The New York Times’ Bret Stephens asked readers to identify his character:
“He tends toward unhinged eruptions on Twitter. He can’t stand criticism. He abhors the media for its alleged lies and threatens to create a Stalinist apparatus to control it. He gets people to give him money by promising things he can’t deliver. He is a billionaire whose business flirts with bankruptcy. He has sold himself as an anti-establishment iconoclast, but he is little more than an advantaged con man. He has legions of fans and they are, let’s face it, a little stupid.”
The Axios portal has recalled that the new CEO of Twitter is running the company with the same manual that the former US president used when he won the election in 2016.
The Trumpist recipe is known for its four basic points: trusting his chosen inner circle for their “loyalty” rather than their expertise; grabbing the public’s attention by throwing out proposals and ideas – not infrequently crazy – before his own team has examined them internally; and keeping everyone in a permanent state of uncertainty and fear.
Elon Musk’s tweet on Monday, where he encouraged “independent-minded voters” to elect Republicans, has marked a significant shift for the leaders of social media companies, who tend to avoid partisan positioning, even if they work for the government of the day.
In this, it also resembles Trump, who gained media space based on an ultraconservative ideological positioning and mobilizing openly racist, sexist and homophobic subcultures that demanded more freedom in the face of an alleged dictatorship of political correctness.
And business ahead of everything, always. Trump used the White House as an asset to leverage the advantages of his other holdings (the celebrity industry, hotels and golf courses). Musk also blurs the boundaries between the companies he owns and strays into projects to colonize Mars, create humanoid robots and invent an orbital internet in the image of his authoritarian delusions.
Like Trump, Musk has exploited the distrust of people who are afraid of the future and prefer someone who speaks to them with grandiloquent ideas. Both know that social networking companies are the ideal complement to any nonsense because they enable tribal identification processes, compact worlds with enemies to fight and arrogant leaders to identify with.
Tuesday saw the first electoral process in the United States in which millions of voters went to the polls after an insurrection that attempted to take over the Capitol in Washington and with a slate of more than 300 Republican candidates who roundly objected to the results of the previous elections.
The use of social media platforms to spread false claims about the “stolen election” has been widely documented, as has Trump’s role in disinformation operations and at the head of an army of neoconservatives, headquartered in Florida.
What does that have to do with Musk? Four days before the U.S. election, the billionaire fired 3,700 Twitter employees, including the teams in charge of election disinformation. With half of the workers gone and the other half demoralized, the lax and selective filters, but filters nonetheless, disappeared.
A Bloomberg agency study published this Tuesday showed that, with the mass expulsions, the social platform has seen an exponential increase in violent language. For example, the use of the word nigger, the derogatory and racist way of referring to African Americans, skyrocketed. Posts by QAnon, a major generator of conspiracy theories, tripled. A coordinated campaign to post anti-Semitic messages had more than 1,200 tweets and retweets.
Charging eight dollars a month for accounts “verified” by the company, with services more relevant to an elite who can pay, does not seem to guarantee control of digital garbage and disinformation campaigns either.
In reality, it is a license for organizations and individuals engaged in dirty propaganda operations to legitimize their activity by simply paying for it.
The assumption that the rich and famous always tell the truth, and do not harass and do not slander, is so false that it suffices to recall Trump again. And his sidekick, of course.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US