twit4bak423

twit4elon423

tag twt is for musk and related

12 22 CLEAR DEGRADATION

evil pending, commons

bad code bak 123 capt

elon 2 404

aha note 1 23 doomsday clock 90 secs disinfo

https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/advertisers-beware-elon-musk-and-linda-yaccarino-are-trying-lure-you-back-rebranding

4 23 quite a lot of retweet of BS ~ indict judge dtr

...As of today, the unthinkably wealthy owner of Twitter has blocked Twitter users from liking, sharing, and commenting on Substack posts. This means that literally hundreds of independent climate publications like HEATED can no longer effectively share their work on Twitter because of Musk—who seemingly only did this out of retribution after Substack launched a Twitter-like feature of its own....

it’s hard to describe how devastating this new policy could be for independent climate writers on Substack. Twitter has historically been one of the most effective platforms for getting climate publications off the ground. HEATED is a shining example of that: When I launched this newsletter in 2019, I almost exclusively used Twitter to grow its audience. I did that because Twitter’s algorithm made it easy for climate-concerned users to find and share my climate-focused articles.

Now, not only has Musk made it almost impossible for climate-concerned Twitter users to find climate articles from Substack, he’s made it hard for them to find climate articles at all. Last week, Musk posted part of the source code for Twitter’s algorithm, which revealed that Twitter de-prioritizes tweets that include links to other websites. So even if you don’t have a Substack, Twitter has become a less effective place to share articles.

musk’s new policy will, of course, harm more than just climate-focused publications and readers. But its stifling effect on climate information is worth highlighting on its own, given the media’s love of portraying Musk as a climate champion. We tried to throw some cold water on that portrayal back in the early days of Musk’s Twitter takeover, noting that his public advocacy for a Republican government would undo any climate gains made by his electric vehicle and clean energy company, Tesla.

In the months since then, the climate case against Musk has only gotten stronger, as he’s continued to dismantle the site that researchers have demonstrated is an essential tool for studying, fighting, and responding in real time to climate change. For what it’s worth, Musk also recently mocked the Biden administration for daring to tweet about climate change during the Silicon Valley Bank meltdown. Multitasking: the horror!...

=== https://heated.world/p/the-climate-case-against-elon-musk">https://heated.world/p/the-climate-case-against-elon-musk ... But we’ve never said much about Elon Musk.... has made great strides in battery storage<...Today, thanks in large part to Musk’s pace-setting, auto companies from VW to Nissan are jostling to invest billions in electric vehicles. Their about-face is driven less by altruism than by a dawning realization that Musk is eating their lunch. “Musk and Tesla forced the change,” says Michelle Krebs, an analyst at Cox Automotive. “He proved that there was a market for EVs.” …

Had the 800,000 Teslas sold in the last year been gas-powered cars, they would have emitted more than 40 million metric tons of CO₂ over their lifetimes—equivalent to the annual emissions of Finland. But EVs may ultimately be less important to the climate fight than the central innovation that made them possible: batteries. Tesla has repurposed the lightweight, energy-dense cells that power its cars for huge grid-scale batteries that provide essential backup for renewables. Demand for Tesla’s smaller home-based Powerwall, which can store electricity from rooftop solar systems, has spiked as consumers look for alternatives to the grid, driven by everything from February’s Texas power shortage to the fire risk in California that has led to power shutoffs. In some areas, software enables utilities to tap into home-energy reserves when the grid is strained, instead of turning on high-polluting standby generators.

Electrifying transportation and accelerating battery storage are two key ingredients necessary for keeping warming to safe levels, and Tesla is indeed contributing to both of those things.

But Tesla is not Elon Musk, and Elon Musk is not Tesla. If you want to honestly evaluate his impact on the planet as a human, then you have to evaluate him the same way you’d evaluate any country or corporation: cumulatively.

How to fairly assess Elon Musk’s climate contribution

When we calculate the climate impact of countries and corporations, we look at their net impact—in other words, the combined impact of everything they do.

For example: If the U.S. shut down 25 coal plants but also added 20 million gas-powered cars to the road, that would result in a net climate impact of nothing. In addition, if the U.S. shut down 25 coal plants but also passed a bunch of policies that would later result in 20 million gas-powered cars being added to the road, that’s would also result in a net climate impact of nothing.

It might be tempting to look at those 25 shuttered coal plants and say, “Wow, the U.S. is truly a leader in tackling climate change!” But that is not how climate change works. You can do objectively amazing things and still have a negative impact overall.

That’s why it’s not fair to simply look at Tesla—only one part of Musk’s legacy—and claim Musk is a climate hero. To adequately assess Musk as a climate figure, you have to look at everything he is doing. That includes more than just his companies’ emissions impact; it includes the political and cultural impact he’s having as the world’s wealthiest person, as those things will ultimately determine whether the climate progress of today will survive in the future.

Let’s look at the pros and cons.

Introducing more batteries and popularizing EVs

In 2021, Tesla claimed that it helped customers avoid emitting 8.4 million metric tons of CO2e— the equivalent of shutting down two coal-fired power plants. Tesla said 6.8 million metric tons of those saved emissions came from electric cars replacing gas-powered cars, while 1.6 million came from Tesla solar panels and energy storage solutions replacing fossil fuel-powered energy.

It’s impossible to know how accurate that is. Tesla does not disclose emissions data or other data on its environmental footprint to outside organizations like the non-profit Carbon Disclosure Project, so there’s no way to check their work. But giving them the benefit of the doubt, this is an impressive number. It’s surely a huge climate positive.

Musk stans tend to go even further than Tesla’s analysis. They claim that Tesla is largely responsible for popularizing EVs, and therefore their impact on solving climate change goes beyond traditional measure. This deserves a bit of cold water. While it’s certainly true that Tesla helped inspire people to buy more EVs, there’s another big reason more automakers are selling electric cars that Musk stans tend to ignore: climate regulations.

China, the European Union, and at least 14 U.S. states have climate laws that require automakers to produce and sell a certain percentage of electric cars compared to gas-powered cars. These climate laws are actually how Tesla has made most of its profits. Because the company sells only EVs, they receive lots of carbon credits from governments—$1.5 billion worth in 2021, to be exact—which they then sell to other car companies that aren’t meeting the electric vehicle target. Only last year did Tesla begin making profits without the help of carbon credits. And that's great, because many automakers no longer need to buy carbon credits from Tesla, as they are now meeting the targets.

But it’s worth noting that for the majority of its existence, Tesla has been selling carbon credits to high-polluting car companies that ensured those car companies could delay their transition to selling EVs. That’s fine, as that was how the climate policies were meant to work. They helped Tesla to be profitable, and pushed other car companies to go electric, too, which will result in long-term positive climate impacts. It just seems like something worth discussing when talking about Tesla’s role.

Investing in infrastructure to keep cars on the road

Electric cars are great, but they won’t be enough to solve the problem of transportation emissions. For electric vehicles to work as a long-term climate solution, we also have to drive less. Musk does not want people to drive less. He wants people to drive the same amount—except in Teslas, and in underground tunnels that his company, The Boring Company, digs.

The Boring Company proposes to solve the problem of traffic congestion not by driving less or improving existing public transit, but by driving in tunnels. As CEO, Musk has invested millions in developing “public transit” systems that are, at this point, just slow roads for cars.

A lot of people knock Musk for this because he could be investing in improving public transit instead. He could, of course — but the larger climate harm is the investments themselves. These tunnels are designed to promote continued “individualized transport” at or above its current rate. This is incompatible with a safe climate future.

Owning a literal methane rocket company

Musk is also investing heavily in an industry that could destroy the upper atmosphere and permanently alter the climate: space tourism. He founded rocket and spacecraft company SpaceX with the intention of reducing the cost of space travel so humans can eventually colonize Mars.

Space travel is not a particularly carbon-intensive effort today, but at the rate it’s going, it soon will be. As one professor who studies the impact of fuels on the atmosphere told The Guardian, the space tourism industry “doesn’t need to grow that much more to compete with other sources” like aviation. And the potential climate impact is even worse than other industries, as Ellen Phiddian wrote for Cosmos Magazine:

The biggest deal is ozone depletion, which can heat the Earth as well as damaging the ozone layer. The soot, carbon dioxide, water vapour, and nitrogen oxides emitted by the rockets all have a warming effect too.

This is compounded by the altitude the gases are emitted at – a recent preprint (not peer-reviewed) study suggests that 0.22% of the upper stratospheric ozone could be lost from three years of space tourism, which could “substantially offset” the progress done by the Montreal Protocol.

The preprint also suggests that black carbon (soot) in the upper atmosphere from rocket launches could be 500 times more warming than soot emitted at ground level, because of its heat absorbing behaviour in the upper atmosphere.

The uncertainty is what makes the space race Musk is participating in so troubling. Musk has been known to jump into things with large environmental consequences before fully understanding them, like when he invested $1.5 billion of Tesla’s money in Bitcoin without researching the climate impact, and then had to disavow the cryptocurrency when he learned about it.

As of now, Musk does not have a serious plan to address increasing spaceflight emissions or the potential ozone impacts. He’s said he’s starting a program to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into rocket fuel, but that’s nowhere close to becoming a reality. Currently, Musk is leasing land in Texas to drill for natural gas that will fuel his kerosene and liquid methane-powered rockets.

It’s unclear what the emissions impact of all this is, because Musk refuses to disclose SpaceX’s emissions data. And he’ll never be required to if the Republican politicians he’s publicly backing assume power.

Advocating for Republican power

As the richest person in the word, Musk is extremely influential. He has legions of fans who take his word as gospel. He has 116 million followers on Twitter. He can disrupt the entire stock market with just one tweet.

Musk’s political preferences matter. And earlier this year, he announced that he prefers the political party that has overwhelmingly voted against every major piece of climate legislation ever introduced in Congress.

[twt]

musk appears set on continuing his public advocacy for Republicans. In June, he said he voted for a QAnon-affiliated Republican for a U.S. House seat in Texas and that he’s leaning toward supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president in 2024.

On November 7, he tweeted that he recommended voting for a Republican Congress in the midterm elections, which would have had disastrous consequences for implementing Biden’s new climate law. Republicans only won the House, which will still present climate challenges—one of which is the potential erosion of incentives for electric vehicles.

By advocating for Republicans, Musk is using his massive influence as the world’s richest man to empower a party owned by the fossil fuel industry. He is advocating for political leadership that would seek not only reverse existing climate policy, but pass new policy ensuring new fossil fuel infrastructure for decades to come. There would be no bigger climate negative than this.

Totally screwing up Twitter

Research has repeatedly shown that Twitter is an essential tool for studying, fighting, and responding in real-time to climate change. Activists have credited the social media site with allowing them to organize around, and ultimately help pass, critical climate legislation. It’s a popular source for climate news and information. It’s the primary reason this newsletter has readers.

Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D

@RVAwonk

One thing that keeps me up at night right now is the possibility that Twitter’s potential death spiral will coincide with a major regional/national/global crisis. For better or worse, Twitter is a crucial disaster comms tool, and we don’t have a replacement for it. 1/

2:42 AM ∙ Nov 15, 2022

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Musk’s recent takeover of Twitter has put this critical climate communication, education and advocacy platform at risk of failure. After mass layoffs and resignations, a former Twitter employee told The Washington Post Thursday that at least six critical systems that keep the site functioning no longer have any engineers.

Climate disinformation has also increased on the platform since Musk took over—which makes sense, since Musk fired half of Twitter’s staff including 15 percent of the site’s content moderation team.

Investing only in self-interested climate solutions

As the richest person on Earth, Musk has the ability to do a great deal of transformative good for the climate, whether it be through philanthropy or political giving to counterbalance the fossil fuel industry’s outsized influence on U.S. elections.

But Musk largely avoids both things. Indeed, his only purely philanthropic endeavor for the climate is a $100 million incentive prize for the best carbon removal technology.

Even that prize is not really purely philanthropic. While better carbon removal technology is indeed essential for keeping warming to safe levels, it also happens to be exactly the technology Musk needs to turn CO2 into rocket fuel, as he promised he’d do at SpaceX.

Carbon removal also happens to be the preferred climate solution of the fossil fuel industry, as it enables them to further delay the transition to renewable energy.

Treating people like garbage

Solving climate change effectively requires caring about other people. Because the crisis affects people so unequally, less-affected populations need to foster cultures of empathy and compassion toward more-affected populations—otherwise, it’s unlikely solutions will move fast enough prevent the worst impacts.

Solving climate change also requires listening to people. The crisis is manifesting differently in every area of the world, so it’s impossible for one person to know what’s needed in every place.

Musk does not seem to believe either of those things. Indeed, he appears dead set on promoting cultures of treating people like absolute garbage in service of what he unilaterally believes is the “greater good.” This is evidenced not only by how he’s callously treated Twitter’s workforce, firing anyone who expressed disagreement with him, but how he’s treated employees at most of his companies. This is how the L.A. Times described working for Musk:

The out-of-nowhere firings, the threats and the bluster, the pubescent jocularity, the day-to-day uncertainty and the urgent demands to work through the night. …

Personal attacks. Union busting. A casual attitude toward factory floor injuries and other health concerns. A dismissive approach to workplace racism. And an allegation involving a horse and sexual favors.

The many people who idolize Musk will look at how he treats people and aspire to do the same. This is absolutely a negative for building a better world.

Do the negatives outweigh the positives?

Perhaps Musk’s work at Tesla excuses all of the climate negatives listed above. Perhaps the improvements in battery storage and EV deployment are worth the risky new carbon-intensive industry, the collapsed climate organizing tool, the megaphone for Republican power, and the terrible treatment of workers.

That’s on you to decide. But personally, when I look at Elon Musk, I do not see a net climate positive. I see an unstable megalomaniac who would rather watch the world burn than not be at the center of it.

https://boingboing.net/2023/04/06/twitter-re-labels-npr-as-state-affiliated-media.html

https://boingboing.net/2023/04/06/analysis-of-how-twitter-blue-check-became-worse-than-worthless.html

https://www.alternet.org/twittervalue-drops-elon-musk/

down 20b$?

https://boingboing.net/2023/03/06/twitters-revenue-plummets-40-in-december.html

down 40%

raw 4 23

social media influencer was convicted Friday in connection with a plot to undermine

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, the Department of Justice said.

Douglass Mackey, also known as “Ricky Vaughn,” was convicted of conspiracy against rights for a “scheme to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote,” the agency said.

Mackey faces up to 10 years in prison.

“Mackey has been found guilty by a jury of his peers of attempting to deprive individuals from exercising their sacred right to vote for the candidate of their choice in the 2016 Presidential Election,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in a news release.

"Today’s verdict proves that the defendant’s fraudulent actions crossed a line into criminality and flatly rejects his cynical attempt to use the constitutional right of free speech as a shield for his scheme to subvert the ballot box and suppress the vote.”

Mackey amassed some 58,000 Twitter followers and was ranked as the 107th most important influencer ahead of the presidential election in February, 2016, by the MIT Media Lab.

Prosecutors alleged that Mackey in the months leading up to the 2016 election conspired with other influential Twitter users, among others, to spread disinformation encouraging Clinton supporters to cast invalid votes via text message or social media, the DOJ said.

In the days leading up to the election, Mackey sent tweets suggesting the importance of limiting “black turnout,” tweeting an image depicting an African American woman standing in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign.

The ad stated: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925,” and “Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.”

The fine print at the bottom of the deceptive image stated: “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by Hillary For President 2016.”

The tweet included the “#ImWithHer” hashtag.

At least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted “Hillary” or some variant of the 59925 text number, which had been used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by Mackey and his co-conspirators.

3 23

"for what?

https://www.alternet.org/anthony-fauci-elon-musk-prosecution/

https://www.alternet.org/steve-bannon-2659583058/

musk a phoney?

https://boingboing.net/2023/03/06/twitter-insiders-tell-bbc-that-child-porn-hate-material-and-state-sponsored-disinformation-thriving-under-musk.html

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88qwbx/far-right-conspiracy-theory-wants-you-to-think-ukraine-war-staged

no lnx

david Gilbert @ Vice News: The Far Right Wants You to Think Ukraine’s War Is Staged: ‘It Is Clearly a Psyop.’

a year after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, tens of thousands of civilians have been murdered, tens of millions of Ukrainians are displaced, and billions of dollars in damage have been inflicted on homes and buildings across the country—and the American far right is still pushing the narrative that the war in Ukraine is fake.

Coinciding with the one year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, conspiracists, far-right influencers, and trolls have made a coordinated effort to push the conspiracy theory that the entire conflict in Ukraine has been staged.

The narrative that the war was fake first emerged in the early days of the invasion, and one of the key pieces of “evidence” used by those spreading the disinformation was a video they claimed showed “fake bodies” in body bags.

The video, which shows the body bags moving in the background, was in fact taken at a climate change protest in Austria about a month before Russia invaded Ukraine. Over the weekend, it was once again shared as “evidence” that the mainstream media was lying about the war.

The most popular post came from an anonymous right-wing Twitter account called Amuse, which shared the video with the comment: “Stop Moving - You’re Supposed to be Dead! Psyop?”

The tweet currently has been viewed over 3.9 million times and been liked over 45,000 times.

When it was pointed out that the video was not taken in Ukraine, the account holder responded: “Someone told me it is some sort of crazy four dimensional misinformation—video might be from Austria. Not sure who is pushing it - Ukraine or Russia. Without embedded journalists we’ve got this mess.” They later added: “No one seems to know who is responsible but it is clearly a Psyop.”

The same video was shared widely across Facebook and Twitter in recent days.

At the same time, Catturd, a hugely influential MAGA shitposter favored by Elon Musk, posted a screen on Twitter that questioned the reality of the war in Ukraine because he apparently has not seen any footage from the war front.

“We get no footage, no detailed updates, no graphs explaining how the war is going, who has control of what land,” Catturd wrote. “All we get is Biden fake air raid sirens and one famous actor or politician a day happily prancing around Kiev with Zelenskyy with no helmets or body protection offering him 100s of billion of dollars.”

Catturd’s tweet has been viewed over 10.4 million times, despite Twitter’s fact-checking community appending a note to the post saying: “Footage and analysis of the Russian war on Ukraine from multiple media sources including reporters embedded with Ukrainian troops is and has been available.”

On Truth Social, disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn endorsed Catturd’s claims, writing: “What Catturd said, and I double dare anyone to say he is wrong.”

Kyle Becker, a far-right commentator who has in the past worked for Fox News and Tim Pool’s podcast, also shared the claim that there was no footage available of what’s likely the most-documented war in human history.

“I am sick and tired of the lack of footage of the Ukraine war. I worked in cable news. I am initiated. If it bleeds, it leads. Where is the war footage? Where are the Pulitzer Prize winning photos? This smacks of a scam and the American people are fed up,” Becker tweeted.

Meanwhile Stew Peters, a far-right podcaster and COVID conspiracist, added to the conversation by posting a video from the Ukrainian government that shows how the country has been working to fix some of the damage inflicted by the war over the last year.

According to Peters, the video is not a positive story about the resilience of the Ukrainian people, but proof the war is “100% fake” and that the damage was never inflicted in the first place.

Peters spent the weekend pushing the narrative that the media and governments around the world are lying about the war.

“The world is a stage,” Peters tweeted on Sunday. “It’s ALL fake. When enough people realize what has been done to them, and they’re ready to admit it, there will be NOWHERE safe for these criminals to hide.”

One other strand to the conspiracy about the war in Ukraine being fake is a renewed push to surface videos from the former life of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a comic actor and using it to claim he is merely playing the role of a head of state.

One of the most prominent people sharing this claim in recent days was Donald Trump Jr. who shared a clip of Zelensky dancing in high heels and leather from a 2014 parody video with the comment:

“Just so we understand, this is the leader of the left’s new religion, Ukraine. He replaced Lord Fauci who replaced goddess Greta as the leader of the leftist lunacy movement. Give him all of your money forever it doesn’t matter how much or for what… the Gods have spoken!”

The tweet has racked up almost 9 million views in the space of just 24 hours.

TAGGED:

UKRAINE DISINFORMATION CATTURD STEW PETERS FAR RIGHT TWITTER WORLD NEWS

an 2 23 maya

When President Joe Biden's tweet about the Super Bowl received a higher number of impressions than Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk's tweet about the widely anticipated annual playoff game, the billionaire "demanded answers from his team," Platformer reports.

Per Platformer, Musk almost immediately flew his private jet to San Francisco-based Twitter headquarters, called in "roughly 80 people," in person, to "investigate various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought they should and testing out possible solutions."

James Musk, cousin to Elon Musk, according to Platformer, messaged a Slack thread of Twitter engineers at nearly 3:00 am the next morning saying, "We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform," James Musk said in the team's Slack message thread. "Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post."

READ MORE: Dr. Anthony Fauci weighs in on Elon Musk's call for him to be prosecuted

Biden's tweet saw nearly 20 million more impressions than Musk's.

Platformer reports:

Employees worked through the night investigating various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought they should and testing out possible solutions.

This comes after Platformer reported last week that Musk "fired one of two remaining principal engineers at the company after the engineer told him that views on his tweets are declining in part because interest in Musk has declined in general."

READ MORE: Elon Musk finds it 'concerning' that an AI chatbot won’t utter racist slurs

Engineers suggested the social media platform's users may have missed Musk's tweet "because he’d been blocked and muted by so many people in recent months."

However, after Musk's Super Bowl tweet flop, top team leaders advised the engineers "if the engagement issue wasn’t 'fixed,' they would all lose their jobs."

Platformer reports:

By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his tweets will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.

READ MORE: Twitter message reveals Elon Musk forced Twitter staff to suspend 'community activist' account

His tweets the following day generated nearly 43 million impressions, and now, an internal source confirmed to Platformer, "over 90 percent of Musk’s followers now see his tweets."

Giving the impression the changes may be temporary, Musk tweeted, “Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… "algorithm."

"He bought the company, made a point of showcasing what he believed was broken and manipulated under previous management, then turns around and manipulates the platform to force engagement on all users to hear only his voice,” said a current employee. "I think we’re past the point of believing that he actually wants what’s best for everyone here."

Platform's report is available to read at this link.

READ MORE: Elon Musk finds it 'concerning' that an AI chatbot won’t utter racist slurs

starlink ukraine pseudo centrist pro putin?

https://www.alternet.org/send/elon-musk-ai/

https://www.alternet.org/twitter-elon-musk-firing-engineers/

raw tom b an 2 23

On the heels of a Republican-led House Oversight and Accountability Committee grilling of Twitter executives over perceived bias against conservatives, the editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch offered up a post-mortem that summarized the proceedings as not only a waste of time but also detrimental to the Republican Party.

Last Wednesday, the committee, headed by Rep. James Comer (R-KY), attempted to make a major case out of a decision by Twitter executives to tamp down a New York Post story on the laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden.

In the words of Comer, "Twitter aggressively suppressed conservative elected officials, journalists and activists,” with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) later chiming in, "I think you guys got played. I think you guys wanted to take it down. I think you guys got played by the F.B.I.”

With the Post-Dispatch editors pointing out that Twitter execs now believe it was a mistake to suppress the tweets, they added that the entire hearing hinged on the flimsiest of conspiracy theories and, "To say it blew up in their faces like a gag cigar is putting it mildly."

"The Republican obsession with proving Twitter conspired with Democrats and the FBI against conservatives boomeranged during a House hearing last week, exposing the wispiness of one of the new majority’s favorite made-up scandals," they wrote. "Republicans have asserted, based on nothing, that the platform was pressured by the FBI to tamp down the story for Joe Biden’s sake. It’s part of a broader narrative on the right that says, again with scant evidence, that mainstream social-media sites are in cahoots with liberals and against conservatives."

According to the editors, what transpired was "oafish" and nothing less than "disappointing" when all was said and done.

They wrote, "How they [Republicans] must have wished they hadn’t even uncorked this bottle when a witness further testified that, in fact, the company scuttled its standing prohibition on abusive language toward immigrants so it wouldn’t have to ban then-President Trump for his infamous, racist tweet in 2019 saying several American-born congresswomen of color should 'go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.'" not to mention bitch ass pussy

They added that the GOP is headed down the road to doing more damage to itself which might root out the extremists in the party more interested in revenge than public policy.

"Maybe the GOP’s plan to spend the next two years in retaliatory investigations against Biden isn’t such a bad thing after all. Not if they all go like this," they concluded.

You can read the whole editorial here.

mma 2 23

like Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes leading his team to a fourth-quarter Super Bowl comeback, this is a show we've seen before.

Billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk offered a scornful dismissal of the news media on Saturday, tweeting, “Some of the smartest people I know actively believe the press … amazing.” But the following night, TV cameras captured him hanging out in a Super Bowl box with Rupert Murdoch, perhaps the single most powerful media mogul on the planet. The latter’s empire includes a slew of major newspapers and TV news networks on three continents; his U.S. assets include the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, Fox News — the nation’s most-watched cable news network — numerous Fox-owned and -operated broadcast stations, and the Fox broadcast network that aired Sunday’s game.

Musk’s actions may seem like hypocrisy or oversight, but they actually fit into a consistent strategy — one Murdoch himself knows well.

Musk regularly undermines and delegitimizes the mainstream press, along with his predecessors at Twitter, by accusing them of putting a liberal thumb on the scale. While he promises to instead favor free speech at the platform, he actually uses his power to promote right-wing propaganda. Musk’s high-profile meeting with Murdoch, who has relied on a similar playbook for decades, serves as a neon flashing sign that points to what he’s doing.

When Murdoch and Roger Ailes launched Fox News in 1996 with the slogan “Fair and Balanced,” they were implicitly castigating the rest of the press as unfair and promising that their network would be a corrective to the purported liberal bias of their competitors. Under Ailes, a former Republican political consultant, Nixon operative, and racist sexual predator, Fox made right-wing attacks on the press a central focus of its coverage, alongside hagiographic promotion of GOP leaders and vicious denunciations of Democrats.

The Ailes-Murdoch strategy expanded the ranks of conservative viewers while concentrating them as the audience of a single network. This had three effects: It made Fox wildly profitable, helped Republican politicians win elections, and spawned a wide array of competitors and imitators who together created the right’s echo chamber. The network ultimately became a powerful force within the GOP, with Murdoch and the network’s stars serving as party advisers and kingmakers who generate its communications strategy and policy agenda. In turn, Murdoch cashed in during the Trump administration thanks to a string of suspiciously favorable regulatory decisions.

There are clear echoes of Fox’s grand design in what Musk is doing today at Twitter. Since he began making moves toward buying Twitter in early 2022, he’s regularly claimed to be acting to promote “free speech.” He declared a month after taking control of the company, “This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.” He subsequently turned over internal documents generated under the company’s previous leadership to friendly writers and championed their work as proof that Twitter had been “acting by itself to suppress free speech” in potential violation of the First Amendment.

But while Musk portrayed himself as a nonpartisan “free speech absolutist,” his record shows him to be anything but. Since taking over Twitter, he has urged “independent-minded voters” to vote for Republicans in the 2022 midterms and endorsed Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president in 2024. And he’s put the company’s muscle behind his personal views, reinstating right-wing accounts that had previously been banned for spreading bigotry or conspiracy theories, including former President Donald Trump; taking advice from the site’s worst far-right trolls; pushing right-wing conspiracy theories on his own account; and presenting himself and his site as promoting “citizen journalism” as a foil to the mainstream journalists the right despises.

Musk’s unhinged antics have driven away the site’s top advertisers, leading to a drop in revenue that he has blamed on critics who are “trying to destroy free speech in America.”

Republican officials and right-wing propagandists know they have a lot to gain from Musk’s control of Twitter, which is a key communications hub for journalists, and are responding accordingly. Their relentless praise for his stewardship of Twitter is interrupted only by occasional complaints about how much engagement their posts get. GOP leaders threatened Twitter’s board last spring with the prospect of repercussions if the company did not accept Musk’s initial bid; they issued more threats at major companies that dropped their Twitter ads in the fall.

Like Murdoch, Musk is lashing out at the press. Like Murdoch, Musk is presenting himself as engaged in producing trustworthy journalism. Like Murdoch, Musk is actually promoting right-wing propaganda. And like Murdoch, Musk is now reaping the benefits of his disingenuous media strategy from the Republican Party.

an 2 23

no lnx etc

House Oversight Committee hearing held this week to purportedly prove that former Twitter executives colluded with federal government officials to cover up a 2020 New York Post article about Hunter Biden's laptop did not pan out the way Republican members hoped, The Daily Beast reports.

Per CNN, hard-right GOPers in the House, including Rep. James Comer (R-TN), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), have allotted a significant amount of time to push their "factually unsupported narrative" that the so-called "collusion" is designed to suppress conservatives.

Ex-Twitter executives Yoel Roth, James Baker, and Vijaya Gadde, and Anika Collier Navaroli testified during the hearing that "it was a 'mistake' to briefly block the article over misinformation concerns," but they ensured the House members that there was no government involvement, Daily Beast reports.

READ MORE: GOP Congressional candidate encourages violence over the information surrounding Hunter Biden laptops

During the hearing, Comer asserted that Twitter intentionally abided by demands from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to cover up the Hunter Biden story "because they were 'terrified of Joe Biden not winning the election,'" according to CNN.

However, the GOP member's accusation backfired.

The former Twitter executives not only proved that there was no government involvement in the Hunter Biden Laptop story, but also testified that former President Donald Trump "received preferential treatment for years" and "directly requested the site remove tweets that he didn’t like," according to The Daily Beast.

Democratic Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly showed that it was Trump's administration that attempted to have content removed in 2019 after model Chrissy Teigen tweeted that Trump is a "p***y a** b****."

And on the other hand, President Joe Biden's administration never called on the social media giant to have content taken down.

READ MORE: GOP lawmaker vows to investigate Twitter employees who may have helped to censor news on Hunter Biden's laptop

A former senior Trump aide told Rolling Stone, “It was strange to me when all of these investigations were announced because it was all about the exact same stuff that we had done [when Donald Trump was in office]."

“It was normal," the aide added.

Additionally, CNN reports Navaroli "testified that the social media company ended its ban on abusive language against immigrants to 'go back to where they came from' so that Trump would not face repercussions for his racist 2019 attack on four minority Democratic congresswomen."

Still, the GOP members remain steadfast in pushing their theory.

“My, my, my—what happens when you hold a hearing, and you can't prove your point?” Connolly asked.

WATCH: Marjorie Taylor Greene 'wrongly' declares her Twitter ban as illegal

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Elon Musk has invited 'suspended' journalists to return to Twitter, but there’s a 'catch': report ›

'A huge oxymoron': Marjorie Taylor Greene's tweet condemning 'candidate quality' quickly backfires on Twitter ›

Marjorie Taylor Greene criticizes Tulsi Gabbard in Twitter rant for giving George Santos 'zero grace' ›

GOP lawmaker vows to investigate Twitter employees who may have helped to censor news on Hunter Biden's laptop ›

Twitter CEO Elon Musk forced staffers to suspend the account of a "left-wing activist," as revealed in a "leaked internal Twitter message," Insider reports.

A screenshot of the message, Bloomberg reports, included the Twitter account for Chad Lodor along with an email that read: "Suspension: direct request from Elon Musk."...>Mastadon profile, they identify as a "community activist, cybersecurity expert, and citizen journalist.” Their Twitter account was one of the politically left-leaning accounts that Musk suspended in November.

READ MORE: Dr. Anthony Fauci weighs in on Elon Musk's call for him to be prosecuted

The activist told Insider they assume their profile was suspended as a result of "an organized mass-reporting campaign," by which a conservative group shared a Substack blog post that included "instructions on how to falsely report breaches of Twitter's rules by particular accounts" — which included Loder’s profile “at the top of the list.”

Although the billionaire CEO has referred to himself as "somewhere in the middle" when it comes to politics, social media extremism expert J.M. Berger told Insider he believes Musk is "intentionally empowering right-wing extremists."

This comes after Musk reinstated the Twitter account of right-wing extremist Nick Fuentes this week, which only lasted for a day.

Contrary to Musk's claim that he falls "in the middle" of the political spectrum, Insider reported in November that he urged his followers "to vote Republican the day before November's midterm elections."

READ MORE: Elon Musk did not vote in the midterms: report

ref

biz insider

A leaked internal message appears to show Elon Musk ordered Twitter staff to suspend a left-wing activist's account

Pete Syme

Jan 27, 2023,

Elon Musk, wearing a black suit and tie, waves to photographers outside a courthouse

Elon Musk. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Anti-fascist activist Chad Loder's Twitter account was suspended in November 2022.

A leaked internal Twitter message suggests Elon Musk directly ordered the suspension.

Bloomberg reported the internal message as saying: "Suspension: direct request from Elon Musk."

A leaked internal Twitter message appears to show that Elon Musk directly ordered staff to suspend a left-wing activist's account on the social-media platform.

Bloomberg said it viewed a screenshot of the message in question, involving the account of Chad Loder, which read: "Suspension: direct request from Elon Musk."

Loder, who uses they/them pronouns, describes themself on their Mastodon profile as a community activist, cybersecurity expert, and citizen journalist. Their investigation into the US Capitol riot on January 6, 2021 led to the arrest of a masked member of the far-right Proud Boys organisation who'd attacked police officers, The Intercept reported.

Musk has described himself politically as "somewhere in the middle" but encouraged his followers to vote Republican the day before November's midterm elections.

Loder's account was one of several prominent left-wing accounts suspended by Twitter in November 2022.

Loder told Insider's Sawdah Bhaimiya they suspected the suspension resulted from an "organized mass-reporting campaign," whereby a right-wing group published a Substack blog with instructions on how to falsely report breaches of Twitter's rules by particular accounts — with Loder's profile listed near the top.

On Tuesday, Twitter reinstated the account of prominent white nationalist Nick Fuentes, only for it to be banned again inside 24 hours.

In a since-deleted tweet in October, Musk promoted a conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former house speaker Nancy Pelosi.

J.M. Berger, an expert on social-media extremism, previously told Insider: "I think he's intentionally empowering right-wing extremists."

Twitter didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Elon Musk's Twitter just reinstated the account of white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who previously said Hitler was 'cool' zzz...A leaked internal Twitter message appears to show that Elon Musk directly ordered staff to suspend a left-wing activist's account on the social-media platform.https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-27/elon-musk-s-twitter-trust-safety-head-ella-irwin-breaks-rules-for-him" "Bloomberg" said it viewed a screenshot of the message in question, involving the account of Chad Loder, which read: "Suspension: direct request from Elon Musk."

Loder's account was <...Loder told Insider's Sawdah Bhaimiya they suspected the suspension resulted from an "organized mass-reporting campaign," whereby a right-wing group ...published a Substack blog with instructions on how to falsely report breaches of Twitter's rules by particular accounts — with Loder's profile listed near the top.

On Tuesday, only for it to be banned again inside 24 hours.

In a since-deleted tweet in October, the husband of former house speaker Nancy Pelosi.

▼ = COORDINATED REPORTINGSUSPENDED] ...>@KathyGriffin (Honorable Mention)@KassandraSeven ▼

[———77,126] @noUpside (lol)

[———70,561] @NYCAntifa

[———43,034] @conspirator0 ▼

[———40,162] @InnerVoltRock

[———30,369] @QOrigins

[———16,812] @NotBadgers

[———16,091] @dappergander

[———14,936] @propornot

[———14,470] @PokerPolitics

[———14,251] @Q__talk ▼

[———14,166] @ushadrons

[———12,631] @AntifaGarfield

[———11,669] @ZellaQuixote

[———10,320] @murphtracks ▼

[————9,594] @mr_gh0stly

[————9,138] @charmsblowpop

[————9,131] @KarmaOneSixOne ▼

[————8,957] @travisbrown ▼

[————8,542] @mattgaetz4head

[————7,066] @Redshoe291

[————7,007] @UnmaskUTR

[————6,132] @nicole_chenelle ▼

[SUSPENDED] @NewKnowledgeAI

[————5,854] @therealyonder

[————5,680] @Gregnus_2022

[————4,991] @JoohnChoe ▼

[————4,933] @Resistenzanow

[————4,864] @WhiteRoseAFA

[————4,685] @SunlightAFA

[————4,575] @mcpasteface

[————4,574] @brainnotonyet

[————4,417] @2ug2ug

[————3,612] @ShartSheriff

[————3,559] @TeaFleurde

[————3,539] @L_instigateur ▼

[————3,487] @DataCollectAc

[————3,211] @botvolution ▼

[————3,139] @AnonCommieStan

[————3,118] @QuacksAnonymous

[————3,069] @ChrmnMAO69 ▼

[————2,973] @shawnpbreen

[————2,901] @CaseyHo

[————2,384] @trutherbotprop

[————2,354] @MnicaViveiros1

[————2,315] @ShermanMarching

[————1,955] @teesider61

[————1,896] @janbobrowicz ▼

[————1,656] @hiitslissy ▼

[————1,400] @IrishGirl2117

[————1,232] @taemkraB

[SUSPENDED] @Blue23Nola

[————1,178] @WebCoderz

[————1,010] @sleeping_kali ▼

[SUSPENDED] @OrweIlianCylon

[——————925] @thealmightymeh ▼

[——————917] @PotrzebieSystem

[——————910] @20user89 ▼

[——————905] @Trumpbangskids

[——————898] @HellMonkie69 ▼

[——————884] @BonnotGalaxy

[——————875] @amberrebekah ▼

[——————856] @friartucknj

[——————850] @maxheadroom

[——————776] @EvilCylon ▼

[——————764] @disc0fella

[——————736] @SpiralDee

[——————715] @Dtrumpjrjunior ▼

[——————650] @AntifaCheck161

[——————545] @BanditQueen25

[——————511] @GetOutNaxis

[——————510] @The_Redwoodsman

[——————501] @def_spooky ▼

[——————482] @winkie_doo

[——————459] @SnowflakeGQP

[——————457] @vonnegut_curt ▼

[——————420] @TommieStephsYO

[——————410] @heretic_masked

[——————398] @cphuxley

[——————386] @V_SCI_INTEL ▼

[——————382] @shwizzzzle

[——————382] @SydReflux

[——————379] @elemenohpeeisme

[——————377] @AnnonDocss ▼

[——————372] @danceswithpugs1

[——————358] @FancyBellum

[——————332] @j6dreamteam

[——————308] @a14_g62

[——————307] @ouroboredom ▼

[——————298] @Ankh_Morporkian ▼

[——————271] @nicole_cares_

[——————253] @AmberTunatya ▼

[——————247] @BlueAnonBurner

[——————242] @InSitu

[——————239] @TitoLibido

[——————219] @LakeDaniel11

[——————213] @Dark_Nukem

[——————202] @AnarchoRaven666

[——————185] @OldWichelangelo

[——————184] @Carl_Pierrot

[——————180] @thebristolsound ▼

[——————161] @SlimjimWatkins

[——————158] @psychohistory_

[——————137] @AntifaSpecOps

[——————125] @VVichelangelo ▼

[——————116] @Ryan_B_Fox

[SUSPENDED] @OrwellianDroid

[——————103] @nofascistUSA161

[SUSPENDED] @Blue22Nola

[———————87] @MrBerryManilow

[———————72] @mostly_blake

[———————72] @JimJarArchivist

[—————————] @Sbdvagabundo

[—————————] @AdolfPutin12

[SUSPENDED] @Pay_Respects

an 1 23 maya

after being banned for almost two years, Twitter has officially reinstated the account of white nationalist leader Nick Fuentes, Rolling Stone reports.

Twitter banned Fuentes for "repeated violations" of the platform's rules in July 2021, and when he attempted to create another account in October after Musk took over, the platform banned him again.

\u201chttps://t.co/QfH909oAFo\u201d

— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@Nicholas J. Fuentes) 1674563407

The reinstatement of his account comes two months after Twitter CEO Elon Musk posted a poll to Twitter, asking users whether the accounts — he, himself, suspended — that “have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam” should be reinstated. Following the majority “yes” vote from users, the billionaire began restoring accounts of MAGA Republicans, such as MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, who'd been banned from Twitter since 2013. Rolling Stone referred to "the return of extremist figures to Twitter" as a "hallmark of Musk's early tenure."

READ MORE: Trump’s bigoted dinner guest Nick Fuentes favors burning women alive

However, Musk is not treating all Twitter users equally. The tech CEO had suspended a select list of journalists, himself, last year from the platform "for, he said, violating the company’s terms of service." A few weeks later, he asserted that the journalists "were welcome to return to the platform" only if they would "abide by Twitter's rules."

Washington Post journalist Paul Farhi reported, “Twitter has privately demanded that the suspended journalists delete the tweets that drew Musk’s ire in the first place — a condition the reporters have refused to accept. The result is a stalemate: The suspended journalists remain in Twitter purgatory, unable to access their accounts.”

Unlike his treatment of the journalists, Musk is granting Fuentes, 24, free reign back on the platform.

The extremist first gained notoriety as a Boston University student attending the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he and other attendees chanted “Jews will not replace us.” He later founded the “America First Political Action Conference,” which has been attended by far-right MAGA Republican House of Representatives members like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

READ MORE: Does Elon Musk have the right to destroy Twitter?

But more recently, the extremist anti-Seminite met with former president Donald Trump and rapper Kanye West, now known as “Ye,” — who, at the time, also publicly spewed antisemetic remarks — at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

According to Rolling Stone, prior to reinstatement, Fuentes has been able to expand a "cult-like following" called the Groypers, and although the coalition describes itself a "Christian-conservative," members and followers often "weaponize antisemitic and racist tropes against their targets."

READ MORE: Elon Musk has invited 'suspended' journalists to return to Twitter, but there’s a 'catch': report

tease? not yet?

https://www.alternet.org/donald-trump-return-facebook-twitter/

yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com

Andrew Tate

@Cobratate

Hello

@GretaThunberg

I have 33 cars.

My Bugatti has a w16 8.0L quad turbo.

My TWO Ferrari 812 competizione have 6.5L v12s.

This is just the start.

Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions.

vxr

https://www.alternet.org/elon-musk-2659291151/

boing 1222

yikes shillenberger!

Eight installments into the so-called "Twitter Files," and The Intercept's Lee Fang finally revealed something that was actually noteworthy: Twitter played an active and willing role in aiding the US military's propaganda operations in Arab-speaking countries.

[twt]

fang went more in depth on the subject for an article on The Intercept:

The social networking giant provided direct approval and internal protection to the U.S. military's network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts at the request of the government. The Pentagon has used this network, which includes U.S. government-generated news portals and memes, in an effort to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond.

The accounts in question started out openly affiliated with the U.S. government. But then the Pentagon appeared to shift tactics and began concealing its affiliation with some of these accounts — a move toward the type of intentional platform manipulation that Twitter has publicly opposed. Though Twitter executives maintained awareness of the accounts, they did not shut them down, but let them remain active for years. Some remain active.

Fang also provided the most details and transparency thus far of any of the writers given access to the "Twitter Files" (Weiss, Taibbi, et al), regarding what, exactly, this access entailed:

Twitter did not provide unfettered access to company information; rather, for three days last week, they allowed me to make requests without restriction that were then fulfilled on my behalf by an attorney, meaning that the search results may not have been exhaustive. I did not agree to any conditions governing the use of the documents, and I made efforts to authenticate and contextualize the documents through further reporting. The redactions in the embedded documents in this story were done by The Intercept to protect privacy, not Twitter.

This context implies a much clearer picture of the whole situation. Elon Musk hand-selected a few writers he believed would be sympathetic to his cause, and allowed them to make requests to search through the company's data archives. It's telling, then, that the earliest installments of the "Twitter Files" were not in fact full and comprehensive pictures of what they contained, but rather, selective searches for things related to high-interest controversies such as the Hunter Biden laptop story, or the banning of Donald Trump. In both of those cases, the files largely revealed … high-level employees at the company deliberating about difficult decisions, mostly good faith.

To be clear, I'm not endorsing the decisions those employees ultimately made; nor am I saying that the way in which the company created rules, and attempted to moderate them, was not without flaw. I just failed to see anything particularly scandalous in any of the revelations. Consider the greatest panic of the "Twitter Files" —

[twt fang]

was I surprised to learn that a former FBI counsel was now a high-ranking legal counsel at Twitter? Not particularly. Do I like it? Not particularly. But I also understand that people change jobs, and that having the FBI on your resume in any capacity is probably attractive to a lot of recruiters. Unlike Taibbi, however, I was not surprised to learn that Twitter's top lawyer was trying to review the files before their release. Could it be that he's still secretly working for the FBI? I mean, sure. Or, could it be that he's a lawyer, and was trying to shield the company from releasing any information that could lead to a potential lawsuit? That latter option is much more likely.

Similarly, writer Michael Shellenberger's installment of the Twitter Files revealed that the FBI frequently requested information from the company, and that the company would … willingly comply, unless they were concerned about legality.

[twt shill]

again: do I like the fact that Twitter (or any entity) cooperates so willingly with the FBI? Not at all. Am I surprised? Also not at all! And based on the emails provided, this seemed like Twitter was in fact doing their due diligence by refusing to hand over certain data without a warrant, which is a positive for the company. Again, I'm not surprised that the FBI (or any law enforcement organization, for that matter) would try to get as much as they could without going through any formal legal channels. And again, I hate it! But it's hardly scandalous.

If anything, Shellenberger's thread on the Twitter Files revealed just how banal and bureaucratic a lot of the FBI's worst behaviors are. It's not that they deliberately tricked Twitter employees into getting them to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. Instead, the FBI was being overly-vigilant to a fault, because they believe themselves to be morally righteous centrist crusaders. After the multi-pronged disaster of Russian hacking and email leaks during the 2016 election cycle, the Bureau was over-correcting — likely in a good faith effort to not repeat their mistakes! In this case, however — as Shellenberger's thread does reveal — the Bureau had little to no evidence to suggest that Russian agents were involved in similar schemes during the 2020 elections. Yet they were still being hyper-paranoid about the potential of such a problem … and as a result, caused even more problems for themselves. This is how it tends to go with the FBI: they are zealots for the Good Centrist Power Structure, and in their efforts to maintain that system at any cost, they tend to make things worse.

In other words: the only scandal is the existence of the FBI. This, however, is not what Taibbi, et al seem to believe:

[twt]

ah, yes, the FBI: a department historically known for its high standards in keeping everything above-the-board, and definitely never investigated Blacks or Native Americans or Muslims or Communists or Labor Activists for the mere crime of existing!

All that being said, Twitter willingly playing a propaganda role for the US military is a uniquely bad public-private partnership.

Twitter aided the Pentagon in its covert online propaganda campaign [Lee Fang / The Intercept]

also thom d

After six installations of mostly-uninteresting "Twitter Files" released as clumsily-connected Tweet threads, Bari Weiss and Co. have finally started compiling their findings into some actual prose pieces published through her new media venture, "The Free Press."

In an introductory article to the Files, Weiss offers a little transparency into how the whole ordeal came about — with Musk apparently inviting her and Taibbi, et al, to Twitter HQ with just a few hours notice. One passage in particular stick out to me:

Musk, who is a South African native, analogized the work of cleaning-house at Twitter several times to a kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But what looks to some like truth and reconciliation can look to others like revenge.

At one point after midnight, as Musk showed off a closet of swag, including t-shirts left by the previous crew that said "Stay Woke," he joked: "The barbarians have crashed through the gates and are pillaging the merch!"

What's more bizarre: this pairing of paragraphs (what a sequence!) or the white guy whose father owned an emerald mine comparing Twitter to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission — like the one from Musk's native South Africa, which strived to unify the nation by creating a comprehensively transparent narrative of apartheid? Typically, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are tasked by successive governments in the aftermath of horrible acts of oppression by the previous government — something like the Shoah, or First Nations resettlements and kidnapping campaigns, or an imperial occupation that famously forced women into sex work slave camps for military pleasure.

By invoking a Truth & Reconciliation Act, Musk is making two deeply concerning implications: one, that Twitter is a State in-and-of-itself, and that two, things like "banning Donald Trump" and "making a bad call about a completely pointless smear piece featuring Hunter Biden's dick pics," are equivalent to genocide.

Is it trolling? Sure, with Musk, you never quite know. Except, as my friend Parker Molloy recently reported with startling clarity, you do know exactly what Musk is saying and doing here. Because his political beliefs — an outgrowth of his upbringing, no matter how much he tries to deny the source of his family wealth and power — have always been abundantly clear. He's a pseudo-"libertarian" in the sense that he's a Republican who likes weed and hierarchical systems that place him at the top, and dislikes anyone on the lower rungs of that hierarchy trying to tell him what to do.

On one hand, there is certainly value in the new CEO for a large social media that has been mired in controversy to try and take some steps to appease a wide range people in order to rebuild trust in that platform. That's a logical goal! But in the context of Musk's history of political systems, I do believe his comparison to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was absolutely sincere.

What's less clear was Weiss's motivation in including that detail (and the paragraph that followed it) in her Twitter Files Introductory Piece. Later in the same article, Weiss goes on to say that her reporting shows "evidence of Musk's claim that, at Old Twitter, 'they were pressing the thumb hard in favor of the left. On the left, you could get away with death threats. On the right, you could get suspended for retweeting a Trump rally.'" Which is patently untrue, according to her own reporting thus far. But, to be fair, she does acknowledge in the article that:

Much more seriously, Musk has business interests in China. Could he wind up suppressing information negative to China to please the CCP? Old Twitter was moderated by the morals and mores of one group. Now it is moderated by the morals and mores of one man.

If I took anything away from my week at Twitter, it's about power. It's about how a handful of unelected people at a handful of private companies can influence public discourse profoundly.

They can do it because of how good the tools they made are—and how little the public understands them. They can influence the outcome of elections. And they do.

I will never not be amazed at how many wealthy, privileged idiots have had an absolute meltdown because they misinterpreted blue verification checkmarks as a covetable status symbol.

aha yikes correction in soc media no longer POSSIBLE?!

an ah 12 22

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top White House medical adviser to President Joe Biden and long-time director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has been serving in the United States’ federal government since the late 1960s. Fauci, who will be celebrating his 82nd birthday on December 24, 2022, has been in the United States’ federal government since the late 1960s. And he has never had a problem serving under conservative Republican presidents, including Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.

The younger President Bush, in fact, had nothing but praise for Fauci when he presented him with the 2008 Presidential Medal of Freedom.

But during the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci became a major target of the MAGA movement. Countless MAGA culture warriors, consumed with identity politics, have turned hating Fauci into a popular pastime. Tesla CEO and new Twitter own Elon Musk, who supported President Joe Biden in 2020 but often sounds very MAGA in his rhetoric, bashed the retiring NIAID director when, on December 11, he tweeted, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” [// desantis BS]

READ MORE: Elon Musk dethroned as richest man in the world: report

Many Twitter users have been calling Musk out for that tweet. But liberal Washington Post opinion columnist Greg Sargent, in his December 13 column, stresses that Musk is unfazed by such critics because his motivation is appealing to the “right-wing information ecosystem.”

“By now, it should be obvious that for large swaths of the right-wing media ecosystem, the Triggering of the Libs has become an end in itself,” Sargent explains. “In the brutal competition of the so-called attention economy, provoking large-scale outrage and loathing is not an incidental feature of making controversial arguments. It has become a key marker of success.”

Sargent continues, “Over the weekend, Elon Musk called for the prosecution of Anthony S. Fauci, the leading infectious-disease expert in the Biden Administration. 'My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,' Musk tweeted, mocking transgender people for good measure. Musk then endorsed a complicated right-wing conspiracy theory about Fauci’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic. Democrats and other Musk critics reacted with an explosion of outrage.”

Twitter users who vigorously defended Fauci against Musk ranged from Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota to former CIA Director John O. Brennan. The latter told Musk, “Dr. Fauci is a national hero who will be remembered for generations to come for his innate goodness & many contributions to public health. Despite your business success, you will be remembered most for fueling public hate & divisions. You may have money, but you have no class.”

READ MORE: How Elon Musk is positioning himself as a 'hard-right culture warrior': journalists

Sargent stresses, however, that while Brennan and Klobuchar’s defenses of Fauci are “reasonable,” they also “seem fundamentally out of touch with basic realities of how right-wing information warfare really works.”

“This sort of info-warring, at bottom, is what characterizes Musk’s transformation into the world’s richest right-wing troll,” Sargent explains. “Tons of pixels have been wasted on efforts to pin down Musk’s true beliefs, but whatever they are, we can say right now that he’s consciously exploiting fundamental features of the right-wing information ecosystem.”

Sargent adds that offending liberals is the whole point of an “info-warring” tweet like Musk’s December 11 attack on Fauci.

“It’s understandable that Musk’s critics are trying shaming and outrage, in that this could further drive advertisers away from Twitter,” Sargent writes. “But paradoxically, it might also help Musk…. In much of the right-wing info-ecosystem, liberal outrage is a sign of an attack’s effectiveness. It can be only confirmation that the Libs Were Owned. Shaming is useless in such an environment, and in some ways can backfire.”

READ MORE: Elon Musk’s epic bumbling is a daily reminder that America is not a meritocracy

https://www.mediamatters.org/ali-alexander/stop-steal-organizer-ali-alexander-claimed-twitter-was-instrumental-his-efforts-elon

fires janitors

https://www.alternet.org/elon-musk-2659052545/

https://www.eenews.net/articles/climate-misinformation-spreads-on-musks-twitter/

scott waldman e and e 12 22 no lnx

scientists say they’re experiencing more climate denial on Twitter since Elon Musk became owner of the social media platform.]

At Tesla, Elon Musk helped kick-start an electric vehicle revolution that will meaningfully cut greenhouse gas emissions. Now, as Twitter’s CEO, he’s overseeing one of the world’s most popular social media platforms that’s rife with climate change misinformation.

And it appears to be getting worse.

Since Musk’s purchase of Twitter two months ago, some prominent climate deniers have returned to the platform after being banned for pushing misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. There also are signs that scientists have left Twitter after their posts depicting global warming research were swarmed by critics.

Among the changes potentially driven by Musk’s effort to tear down barriers that once prohibited figures like former President Donald Trump from spreading election lies are a rise in the popularity of tweets that claim climate change is a scam. Some recent posts have earned 40,000 likes.

Marc Morano, who runs a blog that routinely attacks climate science, said that since Musk bought Twitter the appearance of his name in climate search results “appear to be juiced by the new algorithms.”

“My Twitter account and many others opposing the ‘consensus’ climate view have all increased visibility dramatically since Musk took over Twitter,” he said in an interview. “Whatever Musk is altering, I hope he keeps it up.”

Indeed, the number of tweets rejecting climate science have never been higher than in 2022, according to research by the University of London conducted on behalf of The Times newspaper. There have been more than 850,000 climate denial tweets or retweets so far this year. There were 650,000 such messages in 2021 and 220,000 in 2020, the analysis found.

Musk has said he will sell the blue check marks that Twitter uses to verify account holders to anyone who pays $8 a month. Users who pay the fee will see their posts “rocket to the top of replies, mentions and search,” according to Twitter. That could also mean that scientists who refuse to pay the monthly fee could see their posts lose visibility.

Climate misinformation has long been present on Twitter. But the proposed blue check mark policy could make the social media platform a larger clearinghouse for climate denialism, experts say.

Tweets that misinform the public about climate change can increase interactions on Twitter by generating controversy, said Michelle Amazeen, director of the Communication Research Center at Boston University and an expert on climate disinformation and social media.

“Twitter wasn’t designed to provide accurate info. Twitter is designed to maximize people’s attention and engagement. And how do you do that? You surface sensational, emotionally evocative content rather than surface deliberative rational information,” she said. “That’s not sexy, it’s all about the architecture.”

Earlier this week, a search for “climate” on Twitter resulted in “#ClimateScam” as the top term on the platform. Tweets using that hashtag were a miasma of climate disinformation, cherry-picked statistics and conspiracy theories. On another day, the top result was “climate lockdown,” a reference to the Great Reset conspiracy theory that claims a group of global elites is planning to shut down economic activity around the world to cut carbon emissions (Climatewire, Dec. 6).

Twitter appears to now boost the accounts of serial climate misinformers, including Steve Milloy, a former Trump EPA transition official; Patrick Moore, former head of the CO2 Coalition; and Morano, who runs a climate denial blog. In recent Twitter searches, their accounts appeared in top results with climate scientists, media outlets and NOAA.

Milloy and Moore did not respond to requests for comment.

Some prominent Twitter users who convey climate misinformation and were banned from the platform for other reasons have returned under Musk’s ownership. Tony Heller, who was removed for spreading Covid-19 misinformation, has recently tweeted inaccuracies about global warming. More prominently, the Canadian author Jordan Peterson, who was removed for tweeting transphobic messages, was allowed back on Twitter under Musk and now frequently pushes climate disinformation to his 3.5 million followers. He recently retweeted Heller using the term #climatescam.

“Delusional green policies kill. Literally. Now,” Peterson wrote recently.

‘Radically different’

Prominent climate scientists say they are experiencing an increase of “climate denier bots” — which they identify as having a Twitter handle followed by a name and a bunch of numbers — that respond to their posts. It seems to be an effort to disrupt online climate discourse, said climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Twitter was a primary medium for dissemination of the facts surrounding the climate crisis,” Mann said in an email. “By infecting the online discourse w/ massive troll and bot armies, it becomes very difficult to communicate these facts, which is precisely what polluters and petro-state bad actors like Russia and Saudi Arabia want.”

Katharine Hayhoe, a climatologist and chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, also experienced a swarm of bots in recent weeks. She has been testing tweets and running experiments to check engagement and found a dramatic increase in troll and bot activity on climate tweets, she said. A few days ago, she received 3,000 replies from critics — or trolls — in one 24-hour period.

“I’m not totally sure what is happening, but there is something radically different going on the last month that has increased troll and bot activity on climate tweets by 15-30x according to my data,” Hayhoe tweeted recently.

She also created a master list of hundreds of climate scientists on Twitter. Its membership has shrunk by about 4 percent since the Musk takeover, she noted.

Even though Musk runs a company that has created the exact type of clean energy jobs that Biden wants to increase under the Inflation Reduction Act, he has elevated voices that routinely attack renewable energy and climate science. Some also attack the electric vehicle tax credits and grants that have been a key to Tesla’s growth.

In recent weeks, Musk’s team has provided internal company communications, or “Twitter Files,” to a select group of opinion writers. The communications show that Twitter officials discussed how to handle tweets related to Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election. One of the writers who received the documents was Michael Shellenberger, who has promoted increased fossil fuel consumption and attacked clean energy and climate science in congressional hearings as a Republican-invited witness.

In a recent hearing, Shellenberger said an expansion of electric vehicles “risks undermining American industries and helping China.”

‘Climate is a scam’

A few weeks after Musk bought Twitter on Oct. 27 for $44 billion, the company eliminated a policy that cracked down on Covid-19 misinformation. Some scientists, including Mann, said the policy also limited inaccurate climate narratives.

“That was a clear message that it’s open season on twitter for the promotion of anti-science, and clearly we’ve seen an escalation in climate denial rhetoric,” Mann said of the policy’s withdrawal.

Scientists concluded decades ago that humans are warming the planet at an unprecedented pace through the burning of fossil fuels. A movement to dilute those findings has been funded in part by energy companies and linked to conservative politics in the U.S. and other countries. Twitter is a key platform for spreading that type of false information.

In April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its sixth assessment report and found that effective communication of climate science has been significantly damaged by the spread of false claims on social media.

“Accurate transference of the climate science has been undermined significantly by climate change countermovements, in both legacy and new/social media environments through misinformation,” the report stated.

That same month, Twitter banned paid ads that promote climate denial.

“We believe that climate denialism shouldn’t be monetized on Twitter, and that misrepresentative ads shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis,” company officials wrote in a blog post.

It’s unclear if that policy is still in place. Musk has fired more than half of the company’s employees, including its communications department. The two authors of the blog no longer work for the company.

Musk could not be reached for comment.

Since July, months before Musk bought Twitter, there was an uptick in content referring to “#ClimateScam,” “climate scam,” or “climate is a scam,” totaling more than 500,000 mentions, according to a report released last month by Climate Action Against Disinformation, an international coalition of environmental groups. The messages originated from about 150,000 accounts and spiked around the time that global climate talks began in Egypt last month, the report found.

Researchers found one account, @climate_fact, that was responsible for more than 50,000 tweets. Every few minutes, it retweeted posts that use “#climatescam,” “#greatreset” and other phrases. It’s unclear who runs the account or where they are located.

lnx

That same month, Twitter banned paid ads that promote climate denial.

Musk could not be reached for comment.

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Elon Musk is still facing deep criticism for echoing remarks tweeted by one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's allies.

According to HuffPost, Dmitry Medvedev —a vocal supporter of the Russian-Ukrainian war— tweeted remarks suggesting that the United States would be "ripped apart by civil war, that Musk would become U.S. president, and that a 'Fourth Reich' would be created in Europe."

In response to the thread of tweets, Musk commented saying, "epic thread."

READ MORE: 'Sounds just like Trump': Elon Musk blasted for tweeting demonstrably false meme supporting conservatives

Almost immediately after Musk shared his reaction, Twitter users wasted no time chiming in to criticize him for seemingly bragging about the disturbing Russian propaganda.

"Are you a Russian agent/ propagandist now? Why are you doing this?" one Twitter user asked.

Another user asked, "Are you F out of your mind? Cheering on a Russian war criminal 'predicting' a civil war in the US? Tesla shareholders must be thrilled!"

After hours of facing a litany of tweets, Musk chimed in with another tweet appearing to offer an explanation for his previous remarks. He also attempted to downplay his gushing over Medvedev's remarks by describing the claims as "absurd."

READ MORE: How Elon Musk's anti-Fauci attacks are designed for the 'right-wing information ecosystem': columnist

"Those are definitely the most absurd predictions I’ve ever heard, while also showing astonishing lack of awareness of the progress of artificial intelligence and sustainable energy," he tweeted.

However, some weren't buying Musk's response. In fact, Putin critic and world chess champion Garry Kasparov also weighed in with criticism of Musk.

“This is moral idiocy, repetition of Kremlin propaganda, a betrayal of Ukrainian courage and sacrifice, and puts a few minutes browsing Crimea on Wikipedia over the current horrific reality of Putin’s bloody war,” Kasparov said on Twitter.

READ MORE: Elon Musk has invited 'suspended' journalists to return to Twitter, but there’s a 'catch': report

https://www.factcheck.org/2022/12/the-whoppers-of-2022/

Coronavirus origin baloney. In May, former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro incorrectly claimed, as others have before, that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci “killed a lot of people” by funding research that led to the creation of the coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2. Elon Musk, the new owner and CEO of Twitter, repeated the baseless claim earlier this week on the platform, less than a month after the company suspended enforcement of its COVID-19 misinformation policy.

The U.S. indirectly funded some bat coronavirus research at a lab in Wuhan, China, where the COVID-19 pandemic began, but as we explained, those experiments could not have generated SARS-CoV-2 because the viruses used were very different. Published research suggests the coronavirus spilled over into humans from the wildlife trade, as other coronaviruses have done in the past.

Fauci is stepping down from his government positions at the end of this month, after more than half a century in public service.

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If this past week presents any single lesson, it’s the social costs of greed. Capitalism is premised on greed but also on guardrails—laws and norms—that prevent greed from becoming so excessive that it threatens the system as a whole.

Yet the guardrails can’t hold when avarice becomes the defining trait of an era, as it is now. Laws and norms are no match for the possibility of raking in billions if you’re sufficiently ruthless and unprincipled.

Donald Trump’s tax returns, just made public, reveal that he took bogus deductions to reduce his tax liability all the way to zero in 2020. All told, he reported $60 million in losses during his presidency while continuing to pull in big money.

Every other president since Nixon has released his tax returns. Trump told America he couldn’t because he was in the middle of an IRS audit. But we now learn that the IRS never got around to auditing Trump during his first two years in office, despite being required to do so by a law dating back to Watergate, stating that “individual tax returns for the president and the vice president are subject to mandatory review.”

Of course, Trump is already synonymous with greed and the aggressive violation of laws and norms in pursuit of money and power. Worse yet, when a president of the United States exemplifies—even celebrates—these traits, they leach out into society like underground poison.

Meanwhile, this past week the S.E.C. accused Sam Bankman-Fried of illicitly using customer money from FTX from the beginning to fund his crypto empire.

From the start, contrary to what FTX investors and trading customers were told, Bankman-Fried, actively supported by Defendants, continually diverted FTX customer funds … and then used those funds to continue to grow his empire, using billions of dollars to make undisclosed private venture investments, political contributions, and real estate purchases.

If the charge sticks, it represents one of the largest frauds in American history. Until recently, Bankman-Fried was considered a capitalist hero whose philanthropy was a model for aspiring billionaires (he and his business partner also donated generously to politicians).

But like the IRS and Trump, the S.E.C. can’t possibly remedy the social costs that Bankman-Fried has unleashed — not just losses to customers and investors but a deepening distrust and cynicism about the system as a whole, the implicit assumption that this is just what billionaires do, that the way to make a fortune is to blatantly disregard norms and laws, and that only chumps are mindful of the common good.

Which brings us to Elon Musk, whose slash-and-burn maneuvers at Twitter might cause even the most rabid capitalist to wince. They also raise questions about Musk’s other endeavor, Tesla. Shares in the electric vehicle maker dropped by almost 9 percent on Thursday as analysts grew increasingly concerned about its fate. Not only is Musk neglecting the carmaker but he’s appropriating executive talent from Tesla to help him at Twitter. (Tesla stock is down over 64% year-to-date.)

Musk has never been overly concerned about laws and norms (you’ll recall that he kept Tesla’s factory in Freemont, California, going during the pandemic even when public health authorities refused him permission to do so, resulting in a surge of COVID infections among workers). For him, it’s all about imposing his gargantuan will on others.

Trump, Bankman-Fried, and Musk are the monsters of American capitalism—as much products of this public-be-damned era as they are contributors to it. For them, and for everyone who still regards them as heroes, there is no morality in business or economics. The winnings go to the most ruthless. Principles are for sissies.

But absent any moral code, greed is a public danger. Its poison cannot be contained by laws or accepted norms. Everyone is forced to guard against the next con (or else pull an even bigger con). Laws are broken whenever the gains from breaking them exceed the penalties (multiplied by the odds of getting caught). Social trust erodes.

Adam Smith, the so-called father of modern capitalism, never called himself an economist. He called himself a “moral philosopher,” engaged in discovering the characteristics of a good society. He thought his best book was not The Wealth of Nations, the bible of modern capitalist apologists, but the Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he argued that the ethical basis of society lies in compassion for other human beings.

Presumably Adam Smith would have bemoaned the growing inequalities, corruption, and cynicism spawned by modern capitalism and three of its prime exemplars—Trump, Bankman-Fried, and Musk.

tesla self drive 8 car crash, sells off demos to bump #?

audio show he has no ida how ads work?

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Since taking over as Twitter’s new owner in October, Elon Musk has restored the accounts of some MAGA Republicans who were indefinitely suspended — including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and former President Donald Trump, who so far, has yet to take Musk up on his offer to return to the platform. Musk has been describing himself as a free speech “absolutist” and railing against “woke” progressives he views as intolerant of the First Amendment.

But Musk has suspended some journalists from Twitter for, he said, violating the company’s terms of service. Musk later said the journalists are welcome to return to the platform if they are willing to abide by Twitter’s rules, but according to the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi, there’s a “catch.”

In an article published on December 23, Farhi explains, “Twitter has privately demanded that the suspended journalists delete the tweets that drew Musk’s ire in the first place — a condition the reporters have refused to accept. The result is a stalemate: The suspended journalists remain in Twitter purgatory, unable to access their accounts.”

READ MORE: 'Free speech for me, but not for thee': Elon Musk suspends multiple journalists from Twitter

Farhi adds, “The tweets in question mentioned or linked to a Twitter account called @ElonJet, which tracked the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet using publicly available flight data. All of the journalists were covering or commenting on Musk’s decision to banish the account, which he said threatened his family’s safety by tracking his movements. None of the journalists’ tweets about @ElonJet, however, disclosed information about Musk or his jet’s location, despite Musk’s claim that the journalists had posted ‘assassination coordinates.’”

The journalists Musk has suspended from Twitter include CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, the New York Times’ Ryan Mac, the Washington Post’s Drew Harwell and The Intercept’s Micah Lee. Even Fox Business’ Susan Li was suspended.

Reporters suspended by Musk, Farhi notes, have maintained that they didn’t violate Twitter’s policy against doxing, which Farhi describes as “the unsavory practice of posting personal information without permission.”

“Accepting Musk’s demand for deletion, they say, would amount to a false admission of wrongdoing and an abdication to Musk’s subjective enforcement,” Farhi observes. “They remain suspended”

READ MORE: By destroying Twitter, Elon Musk reveals contempt for democracy

musk says step down when find fool; fang twit DoD

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many lnx twt

Elon Musk’s Twitter continues to favor right-wing content, reinstating dozens of accounts with millions of combined followers

WRITTEN BY RUBY SEAVEY

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM KAYLA GOGARTY & AUDREY MCCABE

PUBLISHED 12/21/22

New Twitter CEO Elon Musk is seemingly continuing to favor right-wing content during his effort to reinstate previously suspended accounts as part of his misguided vision of transforming Twitter into the “digital town square.”

This week, Media Matters analyzed independent software developer Travis Brown’s data sets that were released between December 14-20 and include recently reinstated Twitter accounts. After narrowing down the data to the 50 most followed accounts, we found that 60% of these accounts pushed right-wing content to their over 6 million combined followers.

Since taking control of the platform, Musk has reinstated thousands of accounts, many of which have pushed misinformation, right-wing talking points, and white nationalist ideology.

Over the last week, Musk — a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” — baselessly suspended multiple journalists for supposedly violating Twitter’s new “doxxing” policy or a briefly updated policy against the promotion of other social media platforms. (The accounts have all been reinstated and the latter policy was quickly revoked.) The day after suspending many of these journalists, Musk reinstated a dozen more right-wing accounts, including a white nationalist who attended the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

Media Matters found that out of the 50 reinstated accounts from last week with the most followers, 30 accounts — or 60% — were right-wing. Only 2 accounts — or 4% — were left-wing. These newly reinstated accounts include anti-Muslim extremists, far-right activists, election deniers, and others who have pushed COVID-19 misinformation.

Here are some of the right-wing accounts reinstated under Musk’s leadership last week:

James O’Keefe is the founder of Project Veritas who was banned from Twitter in April 2021. Since being reinstated on December 16, O’Keefe proclaimed that he is back “like I never left,” and has returned to promoting Project Veritas' manufactured and deceptively edited content to push right-wing narratives.

image of tweet

Mike Lindell is the disgraced CEO of MyPillow and has heavily pushed the narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump and used his Twitter comeback to continue to cast doubt on the U.S. election system. Lindell was banned in January 2021 for violating the platform’s misinformation policies.

Mike Lindell is back on Twitter and thanks Elon Musk and writes that all electronic voting machines should be melted and turned into prison bars

The Gateway Pundit is a right-wing website run by Jim Hoft that was banned from Twitter in February 2021, seemingly for pushing misinformation about the 2020 election. Hoft thanked Musk for his reinstatement and has since amplified right-wing accounts undermining COVID-19 vaccines and promoted content that contains election misinformation.

Jim Hoft returns to Twitter

Pamela Geller is “one of the most flamboyant anti-Muslim activists in the United States,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and she was banned in February 2021 for pushing election misinformation.

Pamela Geller welcome back tweet

Mindy Robinson is a QAnon supporter and former congressional candidate. Her first tweet following her reinstatement was a picture of her holding a gun, and she has since begun hyping the so-called Twitter Files to claim that Big Tech intervened in the 2020 election.

Mindy Robinson in front of an American flag holding a gun and winking

Patrick Byrne was previously Overstock’s CEO and was banned in January 2021 for election misinformation. He has used his reinstatement to undermine COVID-19 vaccines and continue to cast doubt on the 2020 election.

Patrick Byrne welcome back tweet

Greg Locke was banned from Twitter for violating the platform's COVID-19 misinformation policies in September 2021. After being reinstated, he has used his account for launching anti-LGBTQ attacks, calling the FBI corrupt, and saying, “WOKE IS A JOKE.”

Greg Locke welcome back tweet

Shiva Ayyadurai was suspended from Twitter in February 2021 and is a QAnon-linked former Republican gubernatorial candidate. Though seemingly reinstated on December 16, his first tweet was on December 20. He later promoted his website where people can pay to “educate your local community on issues of the day with real solutions, beyond ‘Left’ & ‘Right’ or ‘Pro-’ & ‘Anti-’.”

Shiva Ayyadurai welcome back tweet

Naomi Wolf was suspended from Twitter in June 2021 for violating the platform's COVID misinformation policies. After being reinstated, she tweeted, “Greetings. Signed, Deplatformed seven times and still right.”

Greetings, Deplatformed seven times and still right

Mike Coudrey is a Trump supporter who was banned from Twitter around January 6, 2021, after live-tweeting from the insurrection at the Capitol. He was reinstated on December 16 and has used his account to push right-wing culture war narratives about an “attack” in the nuclear family.

Back on Twitter

Daniel Horowitz is a senior editor for conservative outlet TheBlaze who was banned in June for violating Twitter’s COVID-19 misinformation policies. He was reinstated on December 16 and has continued to promote information undermining vaccines.

Well folks, it looks like I'm back. I want to apologize for the misinformation. For too long, I was underestimating the magnitude of injury from the COVID gene juice. I won't make that mistake again. Thank you @elonmusk for free speech, the right to dissent, and reasoned logic.

Wayne Allyn Root is a right-wing media figure who was banned from Twitter in February 2021 for election misinformation. After being reinstated on December 16, he has continued to push misleading election narratives.

I"M BAAACK! Liberal (ie communist traitor) heads get ready to explode! God bless Elon Musk. God bless President Trump. God bless free speech. And God Bless America!

Cari Kelemen was banned in February 2021 and thanked Musk for reinstating her account on December 17. She has since hyped up the Twitter Files and amplified right-wing talking points about immigration and culture war issues.

Good morning from another restored account! I was abruptly suspended on Feb. 17, 2021, the day Rush Limbaugh died. The last thing I did was DM a Bible verse to @BoSnerdley . If that's the reason I was suspended, that was unnecessarily cruel. Thank you, @elonmusk .

Larry Schweikart claims to have been banned in 2020, though he tweeted until February 6, 2021, and was brought back to the platform on December 16. He has used his platform to cast doubt on COVID-19 vaccines and promote right-wing media

LarrySchweikart reinstated on December 16

UncoverDC is a QAnon-linked website that was banned in January 2021 after posting a series of tweets casting doubt on the 2020 election. The account was reinstated on December 15.

UncoverDC reinstated

Young Pharaoh is an online commentator whose invitation to the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2021 was revoked after pushing antisemitism. He was banned from Twitter shortly after.

young pharaoh welcome back tweet

Canada’s Freedom Radio was reinstated in December and has since amplified Russian state media and cast doubt on COVID-19 vaccines.

Canada freedom radio retweeting RT

Bryson Gray was banned on December 11, during Musk's tenure as owner and CEO, but later had his account restored on December 13. Gray is a conservative musician who has used his account to amplify bigoted attacks against LGBTQ people and undermine COVID-19 vaccines.

RealBrysonGray saying he is back on Twitter

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Pagination

Current page1

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After nearly two months of chaos, users want Musk to step down

12/21/22 2:18 PM EST

Elon Musk favors right-wing over left-wing content as he reinstates previously suspended Twitter accounts

12/16/22 6:07 PM EST

Musk just reinstated a dozen previously suspended right-wing Twitter accounts — the day after baselessly suspending mainstream journalists

12/16/22

https://www.mediamatters.org/elon-musk/elon-musks-twitter-continues-favor-right-wing-content-reinstating-dozens-accounts

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Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a top-ranking lawmaker who is expected to take over the leadership of the House Judiciary Committee, has rolled out his plans for the panel's agenda for next year when Republican lawmakers take over the House chamber.

According to NBC News, the Ohio lawmaker is planning to take aim at the Big Tech industry starting with letters addressed to the CEOs of Amazon, Alphabet, the Apple Corporation, Facebook's parent company, Meta, and Microsoft.

In the letters dated Wednesday, December 21, the Republican lawmaker "demanded information about what he called 'the nature and extent of your companies’ collusion with the Biden Administration.”

READ MORE: Clarence Thomas' Wife Goes to Bat for Rep Jim Jordan - Claims He's 'Under Attack' Because 'He Threatens the Elite'

Per the news outlet, Jordan also "demanded documents and communication going back to January 2020 between employees and contractors of the companies and anyone affiliated with the executive branch of the government pertaining to 'moderation, deletion, suppression, restricting, or reduced circulation of content.'"

However, Jordan didn't stop there. As a fierce critic of Big Tech, he's also requested a list of company employees who were tasked with "developing content moderation policies, now or in the past, as well as third-party groups, companies or people the company has consulted on content moderation policies."

As part of Jordan's formal request, he is also asking for the documents to be provided by 5pm on December 29 and requesting that existing and future records are preserved.

Despite Jordan's claims, Big Tech firms have denied the allegations of biased actions and stand by their efforts to enforce the community guidelines outlined in their policies.

READ MORE: 'A lot of explaining to do': Jim Jordan slammed on Twitter for contradictory remarks about 1/6 call to Trump

Many of the companies addressed in the letter have not responded to the network's request for comment.

READ MORE: 'That was not on our account!' Jim Jordan gets defensive after being cornered over pro-Kanye tweet

mma 12 22

there are already troubling signs that major media outlets are buckling to pressure from Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk, with some reportedly controlling staff’s coverage of Musk as they and others spend millions in combined Twitter advertising.

On Thursday night, Musk, the self-proclaimed free speech champion, suspended the accounts of numerous mainstream journalists who have covered him, including reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The Intercept, Mashable, and Voice of America, as well as a set of independent journalists. Right-wing commentators have responded so far by ridiculing the journalists and applauding Musk.

In a very concerning development, Semafor reported Friday that earlier this month, NBC News had already temporarily suspended tech reporter Ben Collins from appearing on air to cover Musk, saying that his criticism — which included a mocking tweet he’d posted in early December — was not appropriate. Media Matters reviewed our internal database of weekday cable news guests, and conducted a search of MSNBC transcripts on the Nexis and SnapStream databases, and found Collins has not been on-air since December 2. (Collins tweeted a somewhat cryptic message on Friday, soon after these claims were first reported, containing simply a heart symbol.)

And while many advertisers have fled the site during Musk’s chaotic tenure — in which he has promoted bigotry and misinformation, reinstated accounts of white nationalists and conspiracy theorists, and worsened the platform’s anti-LGBTQ hatred — numerous media outlets are still paying to run their ads on Twitter. The following media companies, including some with now-suspended journalists, are actively advertising on Twitter, collectively spending over $6.5 million in advertising between October 28 (when Musk officially took over the company) and December 15, according to Pathmatics:

The Wall Street Journal: Over $2.5 million.

The Washington Post Co.: nearly $2.5 million.

NBC Universal Television: nearly $190,000.

CBS: over $1.2 million.

CBS Interactive: over $50,000.

Mashable: over $64,000.

NBC Sports Group: over $17,000.

Other media outlets that are still actively spending on Twitter advertising and have each spent between $5,000 and $2.5 million since October 28 include the Athletic Media Company; Bloomberg L.P.; Condé Nast; The Economist Group; Colorado Springs Gazette LLC; Dow Jones & Company, Inc.; Refinery29; Complex Media Inc. (Verizon Hearst Media Partners); Time USA LLC; The E.W. Scripps Co.; Forbes Media LLC; Thomson Reuters; BBC Worldwide Ltd.; Insider Inc.; The Hollywood Reporter; Vice Media; CNBC; ABC Entertainment Group (abc.com); Interactive One LLC (Radio One); POLITICO LLC; and Upworthy (Cloud Tiger Media).

In response to Musk’s latest round of Twitter suspensions, MSNBC hosted a panel discussion covering a range of important points. They noted that Musk’s claimed justification that a suspended Twitter account had tracked the movements of his private plane didn’t add up, because the account was merely using publicly available information and that the reporters in question had not shared that information themselves, only covering the story of the account’s suspension.

Panelists also mentioned that the social network site is now “operating under the whims of a very capricious leader” and while Musk has the legal right to ban anyone from the site he now owns, his apparently “irrational or whimsical” behavior could drive users to migrate to other sites.

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but it seems notable that Collins was not part of this panel, given his technology beat. (Collins has also been tweeting news about Musk’s targeted suspensions of journalists.)

[twt]

in another troubling sign, Semafor reported that The New York Times has privately “asked staff not to fight with Musk on Twitter.” Separately, the Times reported Friday that Musk’s banning campaign against journalists “could raise the regulatory heat on Twitter, and possibly Mr. Musk’s other companies,” on issues ranging from United States government contracts to potential fines in the European Union.

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On December 16, new Twitter CEO Elon Musk seemingly reinstated at least a dozen right-wing accounts, many of which were previously banned for pushing misinformation or after the January 6 insurrection. These reinstatements come the day after Musk, who claims to be a “free speech absolutist,” suspended the accounts of numerous mainstream journalists.

After reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The Intercept, Mashable, and Voice of America, as well as a set of independent journalists, were “permanently suspended” on Twitter, Musk joined a Twitter Space to say the suspensions were related to new rules he implemented to ban accounts tracking private jets: “You doxx, you get suspended. End of story. That's it.” The reporters, who will supposedly be allowed back on the platform after seven days, dispute Musk’s assertion that they revealed his “exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates.”

[twt grfx]

These suspensions come as Musk has implemented what he calls “amnesty,” in which he unilaterally reinstates suspended accounts, including those that post misinformation and amplify right-wing talking points. Since officially taking over Twitter, Musk has reportedly reinstated over 15,500 accounts, including those of former President Donald Trump, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), COVID-19 misinformers including Robert Malone and Peter McCullough, and other right-wing personalities.

Media Matters has been monitoring suspended right-wing accounts and has now identified 12 previously suspended right-wing accounts that were all seemingly reinstated on December 16:

Mike Lindell

Businessman Mike Lindell is one of the most outspoken Trump supporters who claims the 2020 election was stolen from the former president. After the 2020 elections, Lindell heavily promoted false election fraud claims that social media platforms struggled to contain from spreading. Twitter permanently banned him in late January 2021 for repeated violations of its misinformation policy. He tried to keep tweeting from his business account, but that was suspended too. In May of this year, he again made another account but was quickly suspended. After his account was reinstated on December 16, Lindell tweeted: “I'm back!! Thank you @elonmusk and by the way MELT DOWN THE ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES AND TURN THEM INTO PRISON BARS!”

James O’Keefe

Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe was banned from Twitter in April 2021 for violating “platform manipulation and spam” policies and seemingly reinstated on December 16, 2022. In one of his last ventures before being banned from the platform, O’Keefe went on a tirade attacking CNN, calling the network a “propaganda arm of Black Lives Matter” and baselessly claiming they hyped “COVID death numbers” to “pump up their ratings.” Responding to his reinstatement, O’Keefe tweeted, “I’M BACK ON TWITTER LIKE I NEVER LEFT.”

Pam Geller

Far-right anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller was suspended in February 2021 for violating Twitter’s rules about election integrity and seemingly reinstated on December 16, 2022. After her account was unlocked, Geller thanked Musk directly and tweeted, “I’m back!”

Emerald Robinson

Former Newsmax reporter Emerald Robinson was suspended in November 2021 for violating Twitter’s COVID-19 misinformation policies and seemingly reinstated on the platform on December 16, 2022. Robinson has yet to post on her account, though tweets undermining COVID-19 vaccines and pushing conspiracy theories remain.

Jim Hoft and Gateway Pundit

Far-right outlet Gateway Pundit’s account, which is run by founder and Editor-in-Chief Jim Hoft, was seemingly reinstated on December 16. It was banned in February 2021 — shortly after the January 6 insurrection — for continuing to promote falsehoods that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. In response to being allowed back on Twitter, Hoft tweeted: “The Gateway Pundit is back!” and thanked Musk.

Mindy Robinson

Mindy Robinson is a model, reality TV star, and QAnon supporter who was a Republican congressional candidate from Nevada in the 2020 elections. Her last tweet before her account was suspended, which was posted a few days after the January 6, 2021, riot, claimed that a BLM activist “not only intended to escalate violence at the Capitol...but had masqueraded as a Trump supporter while in DC too.” In response to her account’s restoration, Robinson tweeted, “Guess who’s back on Twitter!” with a picture of her holding a gun in front of an American flag, asking people to comment on her tweet so she could follow them back.

Patrick Byrne

Trump ally Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock who is connected to the QAnon movement, was suspended in January 2021, days after the January 6 insurrection, for his role in spreading lies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. It appears that Byrne’s account has been reinstated, but hasn’t tweeted again yet.

Greg Locke

Right-wing preacher Greg Locke was banned from Twitter in September 2021 after he promoted false information about COVID-19 on the platform. Locke has a history of spreading coronavirus vaccine and QAnon misinformation, and in his last tweet told his followers to “Stop complying. It’s that simple.” It appears that Locke’s account has been reinstated, but hasn’t tweeted again yet.

Wayne Allyn Root

Right-wing extremist commentator Wayne Allyn Root was banned from Twitter in February 2021 after continuing to claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen after the violent January 6 insurrection. Root celebrated his return by tweeting: I"M BAAACK! Liberal (ie communist traitor) heads get ready to explode! God bless Elon Musk. God bless President Trump. God bless free speech. And God Bless America!”

Shiva Ayyadurai

Shiva Ayyadurai, a QAnon-linked Republican candidate who ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2022, was suspended from Twitter in February 2021. Ayyadurai has spread numerous conspiracy theories, including baselessly claiming that Massachusetts destroyed over 1 million ballots during the 2020 election. It appears that Ayyadurai’s account has been reinstated, but hasn’t tweeted again yet.

Jaden McNeil

Jaden McNeil is a white nationalist who was at the January 6, 2021, insurrection. He was banned from Twitter in March 2021. After being reinstated, McNeil tweeted, “We’re so back” and praised Musk.

Larry Cook

Larry Cook is an anti-vaccine figure who was seemingly suspended from Twitter in November 2020. He said he is also banned on other social media platforms Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Vimeo, and Pinterest. In his Twitter bio, he has a common QAnon hashtag, #WWG1WGA, and links to an anti-vaccine website.

New Twitter CEO and self-proclaimed “free-speech absolutist” Elon Musk announced that previously suspended accounts would be granted “amnesty” and has since reportedly reinstated over 15,500 accounts, while seemingly suspending some of his critics. As this “amnesty” plan continues to unfold, Media Matters has reviewed 50 recent account reinstatements and found that Musk is favoring right-wing accounts over left-wing ones.

In a new study, Media Matters analyzed independent software developer Travis Brown’s data sets that were released between December 7 and 13 and include recently reinstated Twitter accounts. Narrowing down to the 50 most followed accounts from Brown's data sets, we found that 28% of the 50 reinstated accounts have promoted right-wing content.

Following his takeover of Twitter nearly two months ago, Musk has broken promises to civil rights organizations by unilaterally reinstating high-profile right-wing accounts under the guise of free speech. He has also used his own profile to push multiple right-wing conspiracy theories and narratives, and most recently, he plunged into the world of QAnon, tweeting out a reference to the conspiracy theory and launching a known QAnon tactic against a former Twitter employee by accusing them of pedophilia.

As Musk continues the trend of granting previously suspended right-wing accounts “amnesty,” he has baselessly suspended the accounts of multiple journalists who have previously reported on him, as well as the account of a Twitter rival, Mastodon.

Among the 50 reinstated accounts that Media Matters analyzed, 14 accounts, or 28%, pushed right-wing content, while only 5 accounts, or 10%, pushed left-wing content. Other accounts reinstated in the same time period included nonpolitical meme accounts, fan accounts, non-English accounts, and other accounts that post NSFW content or seemingly post spam.

The right-wing reinstated accounts have pushed misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ content, peddled COVID-19 misinformation, and engaged in right-wing culture war issues. These are the 14 right-wing reinstated accounts, which collectively have over 3 million followers.

RogerJStoneJr, a bigoted conspiracy theorist, is back on Twitter after being banned for threatening journalists and has since promoted right-wing culture war issues to his nearly 315,000 followers and interacted with far-right media figures.

LauraLoomer is an anti-Muslim extremist who has used her Twitter reinstatement to hype other extremists and amplify attacks against LGBTQ people for her nearly 270,000 followers.

P_McCulloughMD, a COVID-19 misinformer whose medical certifications are reportedly in the process of being stripped, is back to push his anti-vaccine agenda on Twitter to his 691,000 followers.

Bakedalaska, the online persona of white nationalist Tim Gionet, is using his newly reinstated platform of 123,300 followers to call for white nationalists to be brought back to Twitter and ask if he should “say the n word?”

Jerryelprimobau is a user with 67,500 followers who has amplified Musk’s nod to QAnon, as well as right-wing media who have engaged in the culture war.

RickMad is a #MAGA account with 43,200 followers that has pushed conspiracy theories, amplified right-wing media, and engaged in right-wing culture war issues.

WokeCapital was suspended from Twitter for pushing dangerous anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and has used their reinstatement to push similarly harmful and biogted content to 38,900 followers.

DanielLMcAdams has amplified right-wing talking points about Russia’s war in Ukraine and Big Tech, as well as praised the reinstatement of an anti-vaccine doctor’s Twitter account to his 26,400 followers.

AmericanHotLips has posted right-wing memes for 23,800 followers, and the account has amplified right-wing talking points about Brittney Griner and attacked LGBTQ people.

Girlwriteswhat is an anti-feminist account with 23,000 followers that has praised Musk for bringing back previously suspended accounts who pushed misinformation.

Canarymission* is an account with 26,100 followers that has doxxed college students.

Jacksonhinklle* is an account with 93,200 followers that was suspended and then soon after reinstated under Musk’s leadership. The account has attacked “wokeism” and Democrats.

NetAdvisor* claims to be an “evidence-driven research and investigation” center, which is currently inactive, but has 58,300 followers and has previously undermined vaccines and amplified right-wing media.

MeninistTweet currently has over 1 million followers and posted anti-feminist and misogynistic content prior to being suspended.

(Accounts with an asterisk next to them were suspended and subsequently reinstated after Musk gained control of Twitter.)

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In right-wing media, it isn’t hard to find pundits who relentlessly rail against “woke culture,” “cancel culture” and “the thought police” — only to turn around and exclude the viewpoints of Rep. Liz Cheney, attorney George Conway and anyone else on the right who is critical of Trumpism and the MAGA movement. Countless right-wing pundits view themselves as enemies of groupthink, but Fox News, Fox Business and Newsmax TV are hardly full of hosts who go out of their way to hear what non-MAGA conservatives, let alone liberals and progressives, have to say.

Media Matters has often argued that right-wing media are redundant and predictable because they don’t welcome a wide range of viewpoints, even within the conservative/libertarian realm.

In an op-ed published by the Daily Beast on December 19, journalist Kali Holloway emphasizes that many right-wing “free thinkers” are guilty of the type of groupthink that they are quick to accuse liberals and progressives of.

READ MORE: 'Are we free to say Jews will not replace us?' Geraldo Rivera rebuffs Jeanine Pirro's defense of hate speech

“The ‘free thinkers’ see themselves as valiant truth-tellers in a time of overwhelming leftist wokeism — the last brave holdouts against liberal orthodoxy and social justice warriors who have pushed things too far,” Holloway writes. “They claim that left-wing overreach has quashed new ideas and open debate, and many of them profess to be one-time liberals who did not defect from the left, but were instead left behind by a movement gone off the rails and now careening toward a cliff built on meaningless politically-correct terminology and safe space obsessions.”

Holloway continues, “They have proclaimed themselves victims — no, wait, martyrs — of an all-powerful censorious and illiberal left that controls the universities, the media, the social media platforms, and Hollywood — demanding unthinking, lockstep ideological agreement. Worse, they say, this cabal punishes those who disagree by banishing them to the fringes of society, turning them into friendless and untouchable political lepers. It’s all very the-left-can’t-handle-the-truth. Yet despite all this, they boldly carry on, bucking the system, man, and defying the close-minded gender warriors and race-obsessives. It’s all such bu****t.”

Holloway cites Tesla CEO and Twitter owner Elon Musk as a prime example of a self-described “free speech absolutist” who doesn’t practice what he preaches. Others she names range from Milo Yiannopoulos to rapper Kanye West.

The journalist writes, “Musk tweeted not too long ago that ‘the woke mind virus has thoroughly penetrated entertainment and is pushing civilization towards suicide,’ because, I dunno, there are black hobbits now…. The Twitter/Tesla/SpaceX boss went on to add that there ‘needs to be a counter-narrative’ to all this wokeism, as if conservatives haven’t been legally outlawing classroom discussions of race, and school boards haven’t banned books about racism and LGBT rights. As if Fox News doesn’t have a massive audience of ventriloquist dummies, some of whom have taken it upon themselves to threaten people’s lives for putting on drag shows or just living their authentic lives. As if ‘freeze peach’ absolutist Musk, himself, isn’t banning journalists whose coverage makes him feel bad while welcoming literal neo-Nazis back onto Twitter, essentially ensuring that a site that brought about the arrests of Ahmaud Arbery’s murderers and the groundswell that was #MeToo never does that again?”

READ MORE: 'Anti-woke' right-wing bank GloriFi shuts down a month after launch

ref https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-do-anti-woke-free-thinkers-have-the-same-opinions

we seem to be living in the Age of the Self-Identified “Free Thinker.”

Kanye “Ye” West, as far back as 2009—a few years before anti-Blackness became his brand, but after his idolization of Hitler and Nazis had reportedly begun—was already predicting he would “spark a generation of thinkers who will question traditional thought until they find the absolute truth.”

In a recent speech, Former Democratic congresswoman turned Fox News contributor Tulsi Gabbard reminded her audience, lest they forget, that she is “an independent thinker.” Joe Rogan’s entire brand is being a “free thinker,” his mind is so gapingly wide open it might be mistaken for a wind tunnel.

[Joe Rogan’s ‘I’m a Moron’ Defense Is a Cop-Out

CLOWN NOSE ON

Anthony L. Fisher]

Back When The Alt-Right Was Festering Into A Particularly Nasty National Rash, Milo Yiannopoulos Declared The Movement So Full Of Rebellious Free Thinkers That It Was “The New Punk.” There’s Also A Whole Slew Of Crank Comedians—Dave Chappelle, Ricky Gervais, Russell Brand, To Name Just A Few—Who Free-Think So Hard That They All Complain About Being Canceled, As They Rant From The Stages Of Many-Thousand Seat Arenas In Highly Publicized Comedy Specials.

The “free thinkers” see themselves as valiant truth-tellers in a time of overwhelming leftist wokeism—the last brave holdouts against liberal orthodoxy and social justice warriors who have pushed things too far. They claim that left-wing overreach has quashed new ideas and open debate, and many of them profess to be one-time liberals who did not defect from the left, but were instead left behind by a movement gone off the rails and now careening toward a cliff built on meaningless politically-correct terminology and safe space obsessions.

They have proclaimed themselves victims—no, wait, martyrs—of an all-powerful censorious and illiberal left that controls the universities, the media, the social media platforms, and Hollywood—demanding unthinking, lockstep ideological agreement. Worse, they say, this cabal punishes those who disagree by banishing them to the fringes of society, turning them into friendless and untouchable political lepers. It’s all very the left can’t handle the truth. Yet despite all this, they boldly carry on, bucking the system, man, and defying the close-minded gender warriors and race-obsessives.

It’s all such bullshit. And yet, here’s Elon Musk, former richest man in the world and recent proprietor of Twitter, claiming that criticism of his friend Dave Chappelle’s transphobic jokes is evidence that “wokeness" basically wants to make comedy illegal.” (These would have nothing without hyperbole.)

Elon Musk Is a Right-Wing Culture Warrior Above All Else

YES, LABELS

Anthony L. Fisher

There’s Writer Andrew Sullivan, Defender Of The Bell Curve And All Things Negrophobic, Decrying A “Ferocious Campaign To Quell Dissent, To Chill Debate, To Purge Those Who Ask Questions”—Roughly Six Months Before Demanding 1619 Project Lead Nikole Hannah-Jones Offer Proof That Black Men Don’t Have Great Big Black Cocks. (No Really. He Did That Foul Shit.)

Noted Harvard professor Steven Pinker wrote in his book, Enlightenment Now, that “intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressive’ really hate progress,” then blithely promoted the idea that heritable biological difference makes Ashkenazi Jews very smart and Black people… mmm, not so much. (I admit to not having read Pinker’s book, just like he admits to not having read Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist while in the same breath accusing it of creating an academic “spiral of silence.”) I could, but won’t, go on.

Instead, let’s focus on what’s so funny about the “free thinkers,” which is their delusional victimhood and overblown estimation of their own iconoclasm. For starters, none of these people are actually suffering from being canceled—they all have large platforms and huge audiences of people who nod in agreement with every inane point they make. Netflix, Spotify, and Substack are not no-man’s lands, and most of them continue to collect plenty of money and audience adulation from like-minded “debate me” bros, “free speech absolutists,” Intellectual Dark Web aspirants, libertarian edgelords, professional devil’s advocates, “I’m just asking questions” dudes, right-wing trolls, and garden-variety shitposters.

Lena Dunham Is Back on Her Bullsh*t

GAFFE, APOLOGY, REPEAT

Kali Holloway

Consequences And Criticism Are Not Tantamount To Cancellation. Be For Real.

But Also, It’s Just Absurd That These People Think They Are, To Quote College Freshman Everywhere, “Subverting The Dominant Paradigm.”

Somehow, all these “free thinkers” let their minds explore forbidden psychic territories and still arrived at the most conservative, traditional conclusions. Anti-racism has gone too far! Transgender people should just pick a sex! The old identity politics—the ones that centered whiteness—were cool, but the new identity politics are bad! Black people’s absolute refusal to entertain derailing tactics like “Black-on-Black crime” and “but Chicago,” and debates over whether they deserve the rights conferred upon whiteness, are chilling my speech! (As if Black and other marginalized folks’ speech hasn’t always been chilled, sometimes under penalty of death, or at minimum, loss of livelihood. Maybe ask Colin Kaepernick about it. See if Fred Hampton is available for comment.) I mean, these people offer the most boring fucking thoughts ever, and somehow, they want to be applauded for them.

There is nothing “punk rock” or transgressive about literally rattling off the same tired and exclusionary opinions that have shaped, and continue to define, our dominant oppressive culture. There’s no radicalism in punching down on the same marginalized people who have always been used for cheap laughs. Race science isn’t new, trans people have existed forever, and reverse racism is some bullshit y’all made up to account for having to compete on a widened playing field still slanted in your favor. It’s almost like the free-thinker label is self-applied by people whose opinions are so tired and worn that they need the label to seem interesting.

Elon Musk’s Hypocrisy Makes Him the Biggest Snowflake

NO SAFE TWITTER SPACES

Matt Lewis

Musk tweeted not too long ago that “the woke mind virus has thoroughly penetrated entertainment and is pushing civilization towards suicide,” because, I dunno, there are black hobbits now? People keep wanting to make Idris Elba the new James Bond even though he has said he doesn’t want the role and honestly, we should really just stop trying to make fetch happen? (Don’t worry, Elon. Hollywood is rethinking all that equal opportunity stuff already.)

The Twitter/Tesla/SpaceX boss went on to add that there “needs to be a counter-narrative” to all this wokeism, as if conservatives haven’t been legally outlawing classroom discussions of race, and school boards haven’t banned books about racism and LGBT rights. As if Fox News doesn’t have a massive audience of ventriloquist dummies, some of whom have taken it upon themselves to threaten people’s lives for putting on drag shows or just living their authentic lives. As if “freeze peach” absolutist Musk, himself, isn’t banning journalists whose coverage makes him feel bad while welcoming literal neo-Nazis back onto Twitter, essentially ensuring that a site that brought about the arrests of Ahmaud Arbery’s murderers and the groundswell that was #MeToo never does that again?

This Isn’t First Time White Racists Sent Migrants North

SEEN THIS BEFORE

Kali Holloway

Journalist Bari Weiss, A Hero To The Anti-Woke “Free Thinkers,” Literally Founded A School For “Independent Thought”—But Whose Board Of Advisers Contains Not A Single Avowed Progressive (A Few Can Be Generously Described As Center-Left). Weiss’ Quest For Diversity Of Opinion In The Academy Seems Poised To Produce An Echo Chamber Of “Free Thinkers” Who Barely Disagree With Each Other.

The truth is, the “free thinkers” are pissed that the rules have changed and accountability exists for saying wild racist, transphobic, and otherwise crazy shit. They’re especially pissed that the people pushing back on that wildly offensive shit are people they never dreamed they’d be accountable to before. They finally have to consider what they say in the same way marginalized folks have always had to do.

Maybe more than anything, they want to pretend that the weight of history has no bearing on the present. That their own victimology supersedes those of folks driving the movements they claim are going too far. But all those people are really trying to do is get free.

poll

https://www.alternet.org/be-careful-what-you-wish/

https://www.mediamatters.org/ben-shapiro/ben-shapiro-elon-musk-suspending-journalists-you-will-get-no-sympathy-me

https://www.mediamatters.org/newsmax/newsmaxs-benny-johnson-people-suspended-twitter-claim-be-reporters-they-are-not

// alt rt

https://www.alternet.org/musk-trump/

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no lnx twt pix

It was too laughable not to share it: On his Twitter knockoff site Truth Social, Donald Trump posted on Wednesday about a "MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT tomorrow," which included a video of him dressed as a superhero shooting lasers out of his eyes.

It's what the kids online call "cringe" — and oh man, it couldn't have been more perfect for the online churn of public mockery. I'm on a Twitter diet, but I totally sent this dumb image to my friends, so we could join in the hilarity. So many questions! Is Trump really so delusional about his physical form that he thinks he looks like Superman? How can his fans not perceive that he does not, in fact, look like that? The lasers-out-of-the-eyes thing is directly out of the "Dark Brandon" meme liberals use to celebrate Joe Biden's accomplishments. Does Trump not know how desperate he looks, trying to bite Dark Brandon's style? How dumb is he anyway?

Trump has not returned to Twitter, even though Elon Musk reinstated his account and publicly begged him to come back. But he managed to dominate Twitter on Wednesday anyway, as one liberal hater after another retweeted screenshots of the superhero meme, making sure that every Beltway journalist was well aware of Thursday's "MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT." The silliness of it guaranteed much more coverage than if Trump had tweeted out a vaguely normal picture of himself.

Unsurprisingly, the actual announcement was not just underwhelming but an even higher degree of self-pantsing:

But here's the part we cannot ignore: Trump is going to sell a lot of those dopey digital trading cards. As viral marketing campaigns go, this one was a solid win. Not only did all that liberal dunking garner news coverage and dramatic social media spread, but he also conveyed an important message to his supporters: Those liberal elites are laughing at you. And the way to strike back, proving that you're in on the joke and making the liberals cry, is to buy this worthless crap and send Donald Trump more of your money.

Since my book "Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself" was published in 2018, its central thesis — that the modern right is motivated by an obsessive desire to troll the left — has become a lot more widely accepted. Just this week, Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent pointed out that Musk has gotten into the troll business because he understands that "for large swaths of the right-wing media ecosystem, the Triggering of the Libs has become an end in itself." By tweeting repulsive things and drawing liberal outrage and condemnation, Musk can get more engagement while sucking in more fans who love how angry he makes their perceived enemies.

But what is too often overlooked in these discussions is how much this empire of trolling relies on the right's inferiority complex. At the root of the trolling mindset is defensiveness. Conservatives perceive, not always incorrectly, that liberals are laughing at them for being a bunch of tasteless rubes with boring sex lives and expanding beer guts. This perception does not motivate a desire toward self-improvement, but instead a longing for revenge, mostly in the form of imposing their grossness on the supposedly more refined existence of those they despise.

This inferiority complex is why the term "elite" has become common currency on Fox News. They don't use it accurately — say, to describe those who hold excessive wealth and power, but as a swipe at the perceived progressive values of college-educate cultural tastemakers in coastal cities. It explains how Musk, who until very recently was ranked as the richest man in the world, can get away with styling himself as a populist hero. Childish as it may be, Musk and his fanboys are still agitated about their perceived rejection by the Cool Kids.

The slavish fandom that people like Musk and Trump attract is generally confusing to folks on the left, because those two guys are such embarrassing losers. Trump's superhero meme has its brother in Musk's recent bout of social media thirst:

It was already pathetic enough that Musk has been reduced to begging right-wing douchebags to like him. The items in that image make it worse, creating a virtual bingo card of terminal dweebness: Caffeine-Free Diet Coke. A painting of George Washington that was uncool when our grandparents were kids. A fake gun. In order to get the women of Tinder to swipe left faster, all you'd need would be a pet iguana and a decorative sword. (Arguably, the vajra on the table of a non-Buddhist counts for the latter.)

But it's a mistake to conclude that Musk's fans simply fail to understand how uncool the Tesla CEO has revealed himself to be. He's created a cult of dork solidarity around him, one committed to a "Revenge of the Nerds"-style fantasy of ruining Twitter for all those blue-checked people who make them feel bad about themselves. That doesn't just appeal to those who already identify as conservative, either. Musk's cult is part of a larger ecosystem that seeks to redirect angry young men toward fascist politics. Musk may be running Twitter into the ground financially, but as a right-wing political project, his takeover of the company is going great: He's adding 200,000 new followers a day.

In his recent book "Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind," journalist Robert Draper explains that, in his many conversations with Trump voters, it became clear that they were not confused about the actual nature of Donald Trump's personality. In fact, he writes, "the MAGA faithful adored their emperor without clothes." As he told Salon, "everything that we would ordinarily view as a vice they found to be to be virtuous," often precisely because it pisses off liberals so much.

you see this all the time on social media, when conservatives make jokes about how liberals hate the "bad orange man." In making that joke, they're indicating that they know Trump is a weird-looking guy who wears orange makeup every day and also that, by any reasonable standard, he sucks. But none of that detracts from his allure in the slightest. He's basically a human pile of dog poop they get to rub liberal noses in, an animated and endlessly whiny punishment they can inflict on those who make them feel insecure.

Shame is an odd emotion. It can sometimes motivate a person to slow down or stop behaviors that cause it. Just as often, however, it can backfire, creating a defensive reaction that causes the person to double down. Trump's dumb superhero meme is a good example of the latter tendency in action. Liberals have mocked conservatives for years for their hero worship of Trump. But rather backing down, they just go at it harder — admittedly, with a bit of ironic distance — by churning out cartoonish images that reimagine Trump as Superman or Elvis or Rocky or some other masculine icon.

Of course these folks are still suckers. They may think they're sticking it to the liberals, but as usual Trump is just squeezing them for cash. But as long as they keep nursing their grievance over real or imagined liberal mockery, Trump fans will never quite be able to see how much the bad orange man has been using them all along.

3 on AN?

Twitter owner Elon Musk conducted a banning spree of journalists from major media outlets on Thursday evening – including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Vox, CNN, Mashable, and The Intercept – and the targets were individuals that covered him.

The pattern was noticed by NBC News senior reporter Ben Collins and is yet another stark contradiction to Musk's repeated pledges that his goal was to unshackle the microblogging site from its previous limitations in order to establish a digital free-speech utopia.

"I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means," Musk proclaimed in April during his announcement of his intention to purchase the social media giant.

READ MORE: Elon Musk dethroned as richest man in the world: report

But Musk soon began suspending the accounts of comedians such as Kathy Griffin along with other people – like Jack Sweeney (@ElonJet) – whom Musk said are in violation of Twitter's rules and putting his life at risk. Conversely, right-wing conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis have essentially been granted carte blanche by Musk.

Nonetheless, Musk defended his decisions.

“There is not special treatment for journalists,” he said.

“They posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service," Musk stated of his actions against members of the press. “7 day suspension for doxxing. Some time away from Twitter is good for the soul."

READ MORE: How Elon Musk's anti-Fauci attacks are designed for the 'right-wing information ecosystem': columnist

Musk also tweeted that "criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not."

CNN revealed that Musk's allegations were at least partially false because Irish correspondent Donie O’Sullivan "did not share the billionaire’s live location."

O'Sullivan had merely "reported on Twitter that the social media company had suspended the account of an emerging competitive social media service, Mastodon, which has allowed the continued posting of @ElonJet, an account that posts the updated location of Musk’s private jet," CNN explained. "Other reporters suspended Thursday had recently written about the account."

CNN published a statement:

Twitter’s increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern for everyone who used Twitter. We have asked Twitter for an explanation, and we will reevaluate our relationship based on that response.

Executive Editor Sally Buzbee of The Washington Post tweeted on behalf of reporter Drew Harwell:

The suspension of Drew Harwell's Twitter account directly undermines Elon Musk's claim that he intends to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech. Harwell was banished from Twitter without warning, process or explanation, following the publication of his accurate reporting about Musk. Our journalist should be reinstated immediately.

A New York Times spokesperson called the ban of technology reporter Ryan Mac “questionable and unfortunate,” adding that “neither The Times nor Ryan have received any explanation about why this occurred. We hope that all of the journalists’ accounts are reinstated and that Twitter provides a satisfying explanation for this action.”

The American Civil Liberties Union responded that “it’s impossible to square Twitter’s free speech aspirations with the purging of critical journalists’ accounts.”

Meanwhile, Collins' observation quickly went viral, sparking voluminous reactions on his thread.

"My team met with @Twitter today. They told us that they're not going to retaliate against independent journalists or researchers who publish criticisms of the platform. Less than 12 hours later, multiple technology reporters have been suspended. What's the deal, @elonmusk?" United States Congresswoman Lori Trahan (D-Michigan) wondered.

"He’s lying," progressive podcaster Fred Wellman replied to Trahan about Musk. "He never pays a price for any of it."

Many subsequent comments, however, were of a completely unsurprised nature.

"Nothing says free speech like suspending journalists who cover you," noted Sarah Reese Jones of PoliticusUSA.

"The world’s richest man has taken possession of a global social media platform used by the world’s journalists, scientists, governments, private citizens, businesses, religions, militaries and health/emergency services to share all vital information—It’s going as you might expect," wrote Condé Nast Legal Affairs Editor Luke Zaleski, stressing that "Twitter’s Elon’s World. He paid $44 billion to dominate your attention and determine what you see. He knows he can manipulate his personal platform to be in a position powerful enough to crown kings, pick presidents and help produce whatever personal or political outcome he wants."

Former Federal Bureau of Investigation Assistant Director for Counterterrorism and MSNBC national security analyst Frank Figliuzzi dinged Musk for practicing “free speech for me, but not for thee.”

Epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding quipped that "it’s a miracle you’re still here Ben. Miracle of god."

Musk later initiated two polls in which he asked users whether or not he should reinstate the blocked accounts. After the first resulted in an affirmative majority, Musk posted, "Sorry, too many options. Will redo poll." When the second survey yielded a similar outcome, nothing happened until around 3:00 a.m., when Musk boasted that "Twitter right now is" alight.

READ MORE: Elon Musk did not vote in the midterms: report

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"Fox & Friends" hosts recently expressed concern about Elon Musk's widespread Twitter purge of journalists.

According to Mediaite, the ordeal began on Thursday, December 15, when Musk announced that he'd be "issuing permanent suspensions for a group of journalists who have been critical of his tenure as Twitter CEO, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan."

The directive led to critical assessments on Twitter and Musk ultimately attempted to do damage control to explain the situation.

READ MORE: Elon Musk’s overhyped 'Twitter Files' show Biden campaign asked company to comply with its own policies

With all that has transpired, the Fox News hosts weighed in with their reactions as they were stunned by the whole ordeal. After Fox News correspondent Kevin Corke offered a detailed explanation of the situation, Steve Doocy pushed back against Musk's claims.

"Hey, Kevin," Doocy said. "So I was reading this morning, it sounds like some of those reporters had talked about the feud he had with the kid who was posting public information about his jet’s location."

Corke responded saying, "Correct. But I think it’s unclear why the others were suspended."

Fox News co-host Brian Kilmeade attempted to applaud Musk because he “came out and announced it right away,” but the host also added, “I don’t think it was the best move he’s ever had.”

READ MORE: Former Twitter VP urges companies pull advertising from platform — citing Elon Musk’s 'toxic takeover'

When co-host Ainsley Earhardt made another attempt to defend Musk, Doocy fired back again. "I mean, they should be able to go to restaurants and be able to go out and enjoy their lives without having to worry about someone coming up to them or throwing a molotov cocktail at their restaurant," Earnhardt said.

Doocy added, "Sure. But if they were just being critical of him, he’s got to explain why those people were suspended."

READ MORE: Why Elon Musk’s 'chaotic' management of Twitter has a 'distinct echo' of Trump’s presidency: journalist

https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/elon-musk-continues-cater-far-right-twitter-accounts-promoting-bigotry-extremism-and

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elon Musk continues to cater to far-right Twitter accounts promoting bigotry, extremism, and misinformation

WRITTEN BY CHARIS HOARD, AUDREY MCCABE & RUBY SEAVEY

PUBLISHED 12/15/22

Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk has spent the first month and a half of his tenure catering to the far-right by reinstating and interacting with right-wing figures responsible for spreading bigotry and misinformation. Musk engaged with these types of accounts at least 170 times between October 27 and December 13, according to a Media Matters review.

Since gaining control of the platform on October 27, Musk has advanced his vision of Twitter becoming the “digital town square” by unilaterally reinstating over a dozen high-profile right-wing accounts and granting other previously suspended accounts that had spread misinformation “amnesty.”

A month and a half of Musk at the helm of Twitter has also helped conspiracy theorists and toxic posters spread hateful or dangerous rhetoric. Musk himself has even used the platform to amplify multiple conspiracy theories and has employed common QAnon tactics like baselessly accusing a former Twitter executive of promoting pedophilia. Most recently, he tweeted a common QAnon phrase that has given QAnon figures a reason to believe that Musk potentially supports the conspiracy theory.

Media Matters previously found that Musk catered to the far-right by interacting with accounts known to push misinformation and bigotry at least 24 times in the first days of owning Twitter. In an updated review, Media Matters has found that Musk has continued to entertain these types of accounts, engaging with them at least 170 times between October 27 and December 13.

From decrying “wokeism” to sharing right-wing talking points about U.S. immigration policy, below are some examples of Musk interacting with known bad actors.

Musk criticized COVID-19 mitigation efforts and praised an anti-vaccine misinformer

Musk expressed support and admiration for anti-vaccine figure Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and his work. In a four-part thread, Bhattacharya praised Musk for “promis[ing] access to help find out” why he was placed “on the blacklist on the first day” he joined Twitter, in August 2021. Musk responded, “Thank you for your rigorous adherence to science.”

In a thread mocking people concerned about COVID-19, Musk interacted with right-wing troll account Catturd and implicitly criticized pandemic lockdowns.

Musk and Catturd mocking COVID mitigation efforts

Musk decried “wokeism,” pushed conspiracy theories, and criticized “the culture war” when interacting with right-wing accounts

After Musk tweeted an emoji of a bunny, an explicit nod to QAnon and far-right communities, he tweeted “Lmaooo” at a response from conservative stand-up comedians the “Hodgetwins” mocking a concerned response. Right-wing personality Alex Lorusso – known as ALX – joined in and left a similarly sarcastic tweet, to which Musk responded, “Bunny emojis are hate speech!!”

Musk responding to the Hodetwins and ALX on Twitter making fun of people concerned that Musk tweeted a QAnon reference

Musk agreed with the Hodgetwins and another user calling for people to “speak out” against wokeism. Musk tweeted, “The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters,” to which the Hodgetwins commented, “Our future depends on more and more people waking up and speaking out on what’s happening to society. Stop being silent!” Another user added that public figures need to “take an open stand against wokism,” and Musk responded with “Yes.”

Musk expressed support for far-right commentator Ian Miles Cheong’s comment alleging that the media is suppressing “criticism of wokeness.” Musk originally asked, “What do you think of the culture war?” and agreed with Cheong’s response: “A single ideology dominates and silences the rest, branding everything it disapproves of as ‘violence’ and a ‘threat to democracy.’ Criticism of wokeness is ‘stochastic terrorism.’ Only one narrative is allowed to prevail and it is promoted by the media. All dissent is quashed.”

After Musk tweeted a video of shirts saying “#StayWoke” that were found in a closet at Twitter’s headquarters, he agreed with comments made by right-wing figures who mocked or criticized the Black Lives Matter movement. Cheong responded to this thread, “Black Lives Matter (now exposed as a scam, they bought millions of dollars in property and never gave back to the community) was built on a lie,” to which Musk said, “Troublesome.”

Right-wing podcast host Chase Geiser also responded to Musk’s initial video, saying, “You officially bought the world’s largest collection of #StayWoke merch.” Musk responded back to Geiser with two laughing emojis and “worth it.”

Far-right grifter Andy Ngo joined in on the thread, saying, “‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ is one of the biggest hoaxes to come from the American left in the last decade. That big lie has inspired many to become radicalized and militant.” Musk responded, “True.”

Engaging with right-wing accounts, Musk amplified attacks against former Twitter employees and commented on alleged content moderation decision from before his tenure

Musk agreed with election denier Dinesh D’Souza's baseless claim that Twitter before Musk’s leadership banned only conservative accounts. Musk told D’Souza he was “correct” after he tweeted, “We don’t hear much about Democrats and leftists being let back on Twitter. Why? Because they were never kicked off in the first place. Their lies and misinformation simply escaped all scrutiny. Censorship has been deployed as a one-way operation against conservatives.”

In a thread initiated by Tim Young, contributor for far-right nationalist outlet American Greatness, Musk provided context to his decision to reinstate former President Donald Trump’s account. Young tweeted that “the left can’t handle” Trump being back on Twitter. Musk responded to this tweet by saying the reinstatement was intended to “correct a grave mistake in banning his account” and sharing that he “reluctantly” voted for Biden over Trump. In the same thread, a MAGA account asked Musk if he would “support Ron DeSantis in 2024.” Musk said, “Yes,” before noting that “Twitter as a platform must be fair to all.”

Musk compounded the viral hate account Libs of TikTok's attack against a former Twitter employee. Libs of TikTok posted screenshots of a former Twitter employee’s tweets criticizing Musk for laying off Twitter’s infrastructure team. Musk responded to the tweet, saying, “A tragic case of adult onset Tourette’s.”

Musk interacted with white nationalist Paul Ramsey and Andy Ngo in a thread about Antifa accounts on Twitter. Ramsey tweeted, “Twitter is reportedly nuking pedo accounts. This is eliminating much of Antifa Twitter.” In response, Musk expressed his dedication to “removing child exploitation.” In the same thread, Musk responded twice to Ngo after Ngo claimed Antifa uses Twitter to organize violence.

Musk amplified QAnon-spouting conspiracy theorist and Fox News contributor Lara Logan's attack against former Twitter Trust and Safety Council member Anne Collier.

Musk responded to Lara Logan tweet agreeing that Anne Collier should be held accountable

Musk interjected in Twitter threads about U.S. political issues initiated by right-wing accounts

Musk interacted with Fox News reporter Bill Melugin, who reports on and promotes fearmongering around southern border immigration. Melugin tweeted about a migrant caravan passing through El Paso, Texas, claiming it was “the largest single group we have ever seen,” to which Musk responded, “Wow.”

Musk responded to Melugin and provocateur Kim Dotcom about people crossing the U.S. southern border. After Melugin tweeted a video of migrants crossing the southern border allegedly without authorization, Musk responded twice, saying, “Seems bizarre that it’s so easy enter illegally, but so hard to get a legal work visa.” After Kim Dotcom joined the conversation, sharing an article about “Dems voter farming strategy,” Musk responded, “Behavior follows the incentives for political power.”

Musk interacted with right-wing satirical outlet The Babylon Bee’s account multiple times, once about Hunter Biden and another about the 2022 midterm elections. Both times he agreed with the right-wing outlet and commented with laughing emojis.

Musk responded to a tweet from failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake even though it contained election misinformation. Lake asked Musk why Twitter was “still suppressing election criticism & news,” along with a screenshot of a right-wing reporter’s baseless claims of election fraud. Musk said, “Reasonable criticism of elections and judicial challenges are, of course, lawful. That seems to be the case here. Clear incitement to violence will result in suspension and significant deception should result in a @CommunityNotes correction.”

Musk responding to kari Lake tweet containing election misinformation

Musk agreed with right-wing attacks on mainstream media

Musk expressed support for Ian Miles Cheong's belief that mainstream media outlets are actively upset about Twitter’s new direction under Musk’s leadership. Musk agreed with Cheong's claims that the “establishment media is angry” because Twitter no longer controls “the establishment and its activist allies,” and because the public “can now openly question the narrative."

Musk agreed with Tim Young that CBS – and the mainstream media more generally – is biased. Young called CBS biased for briefly not engaging on Twitter, to which Musk said, “So you say ‘mainstream media’ is biased? Hmm, will have to fact-check that with mainstream media. Nope, they say everything is cool!”

Musk agreed with Breitbart alum Raheem J. Kassam’s claim that mainstream media are intent on “destroying” Twitter. Kassam tweeted that mainstream media is engaging in a “co-ordinated attempt to destroy Twitter,” and Musk responded, “They just can’t stop writing about Twitter, which is driving usage through roof lmao.”

Musk and Cheong exchanged similar views on supposed censorship by the mainstream media. On November 11, Musk tweeted, “As Twitter pursues the goal of elevating citizen journalism, media elite will try everything to stop that from happening.” Cheong replied, “The media elite wants a monopoly on the truth, and citizen journalism threatens their narrative. Can’t have that, so they bully corporations and social media companies into doing their censoring for them by calling it all ‘disinformation.’” Musk replied, “True.”

Musk interacted with right-wing accounts that praised the publication of the Twitter Files

Musk agreed with the Hodgetwins’ baseless claim that the media covered up the Twitter files. After part of the Twitter Files were published, the Hodgetwins claimed the “media is silent” about “one of the biggest political scandals in modern American history” because “the damn media was in on the scandal.” Musk responded with a bullseye emoji.

Musk interacted with Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton multiple times about the Twitter files. Musk agreed with Fitton that the Twitter Files provided “damning evidence” that the platform censored Trump leading up to the 2020 election and said more information was “coming soon” about Twitter’s treatment of former President Donald Trump.

Musk amplified attacks launched against former Twitter executive Yoel Roth by right-wing commentator Glenn Greenwald. In response to a tweet revealing information about how Twitter chose to label information about the 2020 election, Greenwald attacked Roth and “his little censorship minions,” claiming they turned Twitter into a “full-on Democratic Party activist machine” to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. Musk agreed, saying “...there is no question that Twitter operated as a Democratic Party activist machine.”

Musk endorsed ALX’s opinion that the public is entitled to know how Twitter made previous content moderation decisions.

Musk saying Twitter files are needed to "restore public trust" responding to a tweet from ALX

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After posting an anti-LGBTQ rant about pronouns and invoking QAnon-related rhetoric, Twitter CEO Elon Musk has now sought to weaponize a well-established QAnon smear tactic to brand Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth as a pedophile. Right-wing media personalities were quick to run with the baseless claims, and Roth was forced to flee his home amid threats.

After the rollout of the fifth installment of the so-called “Twitter Files,” which specifically brought Roth’s actions into question over the decision to ban then-President Donald Trump from the platform, Musk sent two tweets that endorsed baseless claims that Roth had advocated for children to be exposed to sexually explicit online material.

Responding to a resurfaced 2010 tweet from Roth sharing an article discussing whether or not a legal adult who was still in high school could consent to sex with a teacher, Musk wrote, “This explains a lot.” He then posted a one-paragraph excerpt from Roth’s 2016 PhD dissertation on the gay social media dating app Grindr, incorrectly claiming that Roth’s dissertation advocated for “children” being able to access the app.

Musk’s recent attack against Roth mirror tactics commonly used by QAnon adherents, and it comes after Musk posted a known QAnon phrase and has spent his short tenure as he company's self-styled “Chief Twit” openly embracing far-right personalities on the platform. Musk’s actions and tweets have resulted in a meteoric rise in hate speech and harassment toward LGBTQ individuals on the platform, often at the hands of extremists who had previously been banned for spreading hateful rhetoric but were given verified status through Musk’s Twitter Blue feature.

Much of what’s happening on Twitter has coincided with the existing right-wing campaign to smear LGBTQ people and political enemies as “groomers,” which has led to a level of threats and harassment against Roth that forced him to flee his home.

Several prominent right-wing pundits have taken to prime-time news and Twitter to amplify the baseless conspiracy theories against Roth, with others still lobbing anti-LGBTQ attacks that stop short of a full-blown conspiracy theory. A Media Matters’ analysis also found that fringe outlets, including the notorious 4chan board /pol/, saw a significant rise in mentions of Roth’s name and anti-LGBTQ slurs.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham, citing Roth’s past research and tweets, mentioned “pup kink” content and suggested he “wouldn’t see much harm in kids checking it out." She also accused him of standing “with the deviancy” when “the trans fanatics” are “preying on our children.” Ingraham also complained that Roth is “now playing the victim.”

On Twitter, conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec shared a screenshot of Roth’s 12-year-old tweet about “whether high school students can ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers” and said: “If only there had been some warning signs about Yoel Roth.”

One America News host Kara McKinney read an excerpt from Roth’s dissertation, saying, “New information is coming to light about Roth and his disturbing proclivities.” McKinney baselessly smeared Roth as being responsible for “child exploitation” on the platform, saying moderation and “the accommodation approach that Roth pioneered may be responsible for the proliferation of unwanted sexual advances, child exploitation, and lewd comments about sexual relationships between adults and children.” McKinney asked her guest, “Do you think it’s part of the overall movement on the left of really pushing down the age of consent lower and lower?” Mckinney’s guest, anti-LGBTQ figure James Lindsay, suggested that pedophilia is “part in parcel" for gay relationships and claimed that “it's quite clear that characters like Roth don't know what a healthy boundary” between minors and adults “looks like.”

Discussing Roth’s dissertation, OAN host Addison Smith claimed that “this so-called LGBTQ comprehensive sex education” is just “cryptic language for … ‘we’re coming for your children; we’ll convert your children.’” Smith later asked his guest, Standing for Freedom Executive Director Ryan Helfenbein, why companies like Twitter “all so explicitly target young kids.” Helfenbein responded calling it “sex Marxism” trying to “deconstruct a child in order to groom them.” Helfenbein called it “demonic” and “straight from the pit of Hell.”

After reading an excerpt of Roth’s dissertation, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro misrepresented it and said Roth “is recommending Grindr make itself available to 16-17 year old kids so they can hook-up with each other, quote unquote, ‘safely.’”

Right-wing comedian and radio host Tim Young replied to Roth’s 2010 tweet saying, “This tweet just clarified why the term 'groomer' was considered 'hate speech' on Twitter.”

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Supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory have celebrated Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeting a phrase that has been regularly invoked in the community, taking it as evidence that he supposedly supports the conspiracy theory in some manner.

On December 12, Musk tweeted, “Follow” next to a rabbit emoji. The wording with the emoji would seem to be referring to the phrase “follow the white rabbit,” a reference to the classic fantasy novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which was repopularized by The Matrix film franchise and subsequently adopted as an online rallying cry in the early days of the QAnon movement. The conspiracy theory’s central figure, “Q”, repeatedly referenced the “white rabbit” and the story directly in posts.

QAnon figures, who were already primed to believe that Musk was an ally, hyped Musk’s “clear Q reference” as some kind of green light, along with a follow-up tweet from Musk in response to a scene in The Matrix about choosing between taking a blue pill and a red pill (which has been embraced in the far-right as so-called “red-pilling,” referring to a process by with individuals come to support far-right ideas). Adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory claimed Musk has been “keeping with the Q Comms” and was “on pace to start posting Q drops to millions of normies,” with some believing the tweet may already be referring to a Q post

[twts]

the QAnon community’s excitement for Musk’s tweet comes as Musk has pushed claims of child trafficking on Twitter and blamed Twitter’s leadership, including targeting Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, who was forced to flee his home due to threats. It also comes as more QAnon accounts have come back or at least attempted to come back to Twitter in the midst of Musk taking over the platform.

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Last week, Chief Twit Elon Musk enlisted Substacker Matt Taibbi to recap Twitter’s handling of the “Hunter Biden laptop” story based on archived corporate emails that Musk now owns.

It already seems like a lifetime ago, but in October 2020, weeks before the presidential election, the New York Post published a story about a disk image allegedly taken from a laptop that Hunter Biden had abandoned at a repair shop in Delaware.

Twitter temporarily blocked the story because it included personally identifiable information that they suspected had been hacked. Republicans said it was horribly partisan to the Donald Trump campaign of colluding with the Russians, even though the disk image came from Rudy Giuliani who had been very publicly pumping Russian agents for dirt on Hunter Biden for months.