Elon Musk Is A Threat To Democracy

Elon wields an enormous weapon, capable of skewing our elections into the dinky hands of Donald Trump.

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC – In case you’re still wondering why I’m continuously shouting about Elon Musk and what he’s done to Twitter, please read on. 

For whatever reason, whenever I talk about Elon and Twitter, whether it’s the bluecheck madness or its lack of internal oversight, I run up against readers and listeners telling me that Twitter is a meaningless waste of time, so stop it. 

Those people are wrong.

My anti-Elon posture is entirely about the integrity of the national debate and the preservation of democracy. I’ve been professionally covering issues like this for a long time, and I don’t mind saying I have a pretty strong track record forecasting these things. You need to trust me when I warn that Elon’s relentless monkeying with Twitter should alarm all Normals. As President Biden might say: it’s a big goddamn deal.

Before we dig into what happened with Elon and Turkey’s elections, NBC News reported (WARNING: link contains graphic descriptions) last week that Elon’s reinstating of the worst bottom-feeders on the internet, allowing them to buy more visibility through his janky Twitter Blue thing, along with the fact that Elon’s trying to run this massive enterprise with a tiny staff, contributed to the awful platforming of dog and cat torture videos. 

Reporter Ben Collins discovered that Elon’s search autocomplete system was steering users to those videos. If you entered the word “cat” in the search window, several of the top suggestions were versions of “cat [torture video].” (I can’t bring myself to write what the actual content of the videos were. In fact, I wish I could delete that information from my brain.)

When NBC News initially contacted Twitter about it, they received a message back: a poop emoji. 

Users had been trying to alert Elon to the videos for days without response. That’s how seriously Elon took this horrendousness. Later, Elon disabled the autocomplete feature, but I couldn’t find any indication the videos themselves were removed or whether the users who posted them were sanctioned. Since he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, I’ll assume he removed neither.

This wouldn’t have happened if Elon hadn’t meddled so badly with the platform. At the very least, it would’ve been stopped more rapidly, pre-Elon.

It gets worse.

We also learned that Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan used a court order to demand that Twitter block 80 different opposition accounts ahead of the country’s Sunday May 14 elections, or else just like in 2014, Turkey would block the app for all of its citizens. (In 2014, Twitter instructed Turkish citizens how to get around the block and the app was eventually restored.) Now, you’d think due to Elon’s alleged free speech absolutism, he would’ve told Erdogan where to shove his demands. After all, whenever Elon goes on TV he can’t stop bragging about his belief in free speech.

But no.

Elon ended up blocking several opposition accounts instead of allowing the app to be blocked for everyone inside Turkey (temporarily). Why? Obviously because Elon is more concerned about protecting his overpriced investment than he is about free speech.

Remember the hissy fit Elon had about the Twitter files? In that case, Elon objected to the fact that the Biden campaign asked Twitter to remove Hunter Biden dick pics. It’s also worth noting that the Trump White House also pressured Twitter to remove certain tweets. Elon and his hand-picked reporter Matt Taibbi sharply criticized these requests and the fact that Twitter merely followed its terms of service when it came to removing tweets that contained revenge porn. Yet Elon snapped to attention when Erdogan wanted entire accounts blocked.

Additionally, if we rewind to September 2021, we discover that Elon’s SpaceX signed a lucrative deal to provide rockets for Erdogan’s Turksat 6A satellite program. There’s no way of knowing for sure whether Elon’s throttling of the Turkish opposition was to protect this deal, but I say again: does he deserve the benefit of the doubt?

To be clear: the Turkey story, at least for you and me, isn’t really about Turkey. It’s about our elections in 2024 and beyond. 

Elon wields an enormous weapon, capable of skewing our elections into the dinky hands of Donald Trump. We only need to rewind to 2016 and what happened with social media disinformation to understand how that can work. And it can absolutely happen again. 

In addition to selling bluechecks to Russian troll farms, Elon doesn’t really believe in the existence of disinformation – he thinks it’s just regular information that you and I disagree with. And what’ll happen if, say, the Trump campaign pressures Elon to block Democratic accounts next year, just as Erdogan did this year? Elon believes the Democrats are spreading the so-called “woke mind virus,” and he tweeted anti-Semitic remarks about George Soros. We simply can’t and shouldn’t trust him to take a hands off approach in the next election.

If you don’t think this is worthy of coverage, I don’t know what to tell you. But the sooner we all accept that this is a big effing deal, the sooner we can talk about a solution before it’s too late.

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