It’s difficult to find a single source succinctly summarising the extent of Elon Musk’s meltdown on X in recent weeks. His output has been frenetic, and shows the venom of its misinformation and himself towards opponents or those contradicting him.
New York Times
For our domestic audience, this New York Times piece does a fair job of the chaotic rage of his infatuation with the UK. Musk’s poll that the US should liberate the UK of its ‘tyrannical government’
was followed by “… a barrage of strident posts about Britain by Musk — assailing the Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer; demanding the release of a jailed far-right agitator; and breaking with a far-right leader, Nigel Farage — it came off less as a joke than a flex by a powerful man relishing his ability to roil the politics of another country.”
UK press
As British columnist Ian Dunt observed, the UK press per the Express, Times, and Telegraph, instead of coming down a ton on Musk’s meddling in our sovereign nation’s affairs, and his weaponising of the victims of rape gangs to do so, have only amplified the South African billionaire’s lies, while the Tories have abandoned patriotism and replaced it with conspiracy.
So we leave it to the Americans to objectively observe what we do. Which they can. For now. For Musk, maybe he saw lonely little Britain as pure sport while he tries meddling all over Europe, while this fact check from Al Jazeera asks if Musk’s way into the White House was similarly won.
Facebook and ‘free speech’
Mark Zuckerberg isn’t personally using the platform he founded, Facebook, or the platform he bought, Instagram, as soapboxes for his own vitriolic misinformation – but Meta is stepping back from moderating others’ efforts to do so, ridding itself of tens of thousands of professional fact-checkers on both sites. Their argument is that defending truth is somehow ‘censorship’ – and installing ‘community notes’, a la X, which are as susceptible to malevolent use as the original lies themselves. This is in the name of ‘free speech’ although as seen with X, ‘free speech’ has been bastardised and weaponised by the far right as licence to say anything no matter how dangerous.
The toxicity of X and resurgence of BlueSky
The recent reboot and resurgence of BlueSky has mainly been due to individuals, institutes, and companies having had enough of X’s utter toxicity. They prefer a return to an online ‘town square’ where divergent, opposing views can be civilly discussed and exchanged. This is where understanding comes, instead of a back alley of bot farms, trolls, fake accounts enabled by malevolent algorithms sent to distract, drown out, or outright threaten dissenters. Meta may face a similar exodus.
While Musk is very much part of the incoming Trump administration, was the latter behind Zuckerberg’s move on moderators? Newsweek argues this was a slower burn than that – but the point is clear; at the incalculable cost of truth and the democracies it underpins, our bro-billionaires are prepared to hedge their bets, indeed advance their interests.
The Washington Post – and another billionaire
In old print, the venerable US paper the Washington Post, maybe forever best known for its investigative reportage on Watergate that brought down Richard Nixon, is now owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. Shortly before last November’s US election, the Post broke with its tradition of endorsing a particular presidential candidate (it would have been Kamala Harris). Some editorial staff and hundreds of thousands of subscribers quit, while Bezos defended the move on the Post’s website, “No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement’. None,” the BBC reported, continuing: “What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence.”
But if voters are savvy enough to dispel such explicit endorsements, which have an honesty to them, what’s wrong? It’s also very difficult to think of a paper that doesn’t take a side, so why is the Post circumscribed thus? The problem is, was that decision anything to do with executives from Bezos’s space vehicle firm Blue Origin meeting the then-presidential candidate Donald Trump the same day the endorsement was pulled?
Now we wonder if Bezos is as thin-skinned as Trump. The Post’s spiking of Ann Talnaes’ cartoon satirizing Bezos, among others, led the Pulitzer-prize-winning cartoonist to resign in disgust (the cartoon meanwhile instead went viral in a way it wouldn’t have done otherwise).
The sycophancy runs thicker, as Amazon has recently bought Melania Trump’s life story for $40 million in what even the Telegraph called “Bezos’ latest overture to Trump”.
Just to think that last July was the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, while this month marks the tenth anniversary of the massacre of 12 staff at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by Islamic militants, in outrage at a cartoon depicting Prophet Muhammed.
Sanewashing
The BBC has also helped with micro-aggressive instances of ‘sanewashing’ Trump’s maniacal demand this month to appropriate the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland as US property:
“It’s unclear how serious the president-elect is about adding to the territory of the US, particularly when it comes to Canada, a country of 41 million people and the second-largest nation by area in the world.”
Ah, “adding territory”. Not menacing democratic, sovereign allies’ threats of economic coercion or invasion, but “adding territory”.
Conclusion
To spread misinformation and manipulate has always been the dark side of mass media as abused by the rich – who’ve become rich and powerful with those weapons against the elected and self-installed. The story hasn’t changed, just the intensity of the media; whereas once we all had to listen to that one radio channel, now the lies are tailored to us and delivered into our pockets. This is atomised fascism, the mass of individuals misled by individuals.
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