Moore of Cornell’s medical school told me a few weeks ago, if you get embraced by fringe people and “have that psychological need for some kind of affirmation from people you’re interacting with, it must be very seductive.” It’s also conceivable that Musk craves validation and has found a nice, warm, moist spot among extremists who have come to view him as their hero. The underlying theme of those guesses is that Musk hasn’t moved right, but for some reason feels empowered today to express long-held opinions more openly. With whims of iron, Zuckerberg and Musk are bringing their companies to the edge of the grave, and shareholders and users have no say in the outcome. Marshall compiled some of the prevailing conjectures, his upbringing in apartheid-era South Africa and his connections with rightist Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel among them.īusiness Column: Meta and Twitter show the drawbacks of giving self-satisfied billionaires too much power What might account for Musk’s overt swerve to the far right is unclear. Two days later, he tweeted that “ the woke mind virus has thoroughly penetrated entertainment and is pushing civilization towards suicide. Twitter is moving rapidly to establish an even playing field. I’m sure this comes as no surprise to anyone watching closely. “Far left San Francisco/Berkeley views have been propagated to the world via Twitter. “It has been really bad,” he tweeted on Nov. Musk appears to have fully bought into the right-wing view that as a public company, Twitter had systematically suppressed conservatives and promoted progressive accounts. In response to a tweet depicting “Woke Propoganda” as a Trojan horse led by “Woke teachers” to attack “Kid’s brain,” Musk tweeted back, “Exactly.” Musk responded, “Behavior follows the incentives for political power.” “Kim Dotcom” is the pseudonym of German-born Kim Schmitz, an accused internet pirate who has been in New Zealand fighting extradition to the U.S. The previous day, Musk implicitly endorsed a tweet by hacker Kim Dotcom accusing the Biden administration of advancing an immigration policy that was a Democratic Party “voter farming strategy” - that is, growing the party’s voting base to “preserve power” by legalizing immigrants.
The original message came from Paul Ray Ramsey, who tweets under the handle As the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented, Ramsey is a white nationalist who has labeled women’s suffrage a “cancer” and questioned the historical truth of the Holocaust. Is that why is he taking such dumb steps with Twitter? In recent days, Musk has “increasingly been promoting far-right theories and white supremacist content,” observed Josh Marshall on his Talking Points Memo website, where he helpfully compiled some of the most glaring examples.īusiness Column: Is Elon Musk a genius or an idiot?Įlon Musk has mistaken his Tesla and SpaceX companies’ success as testaments to his brilliance. “Vindman is both puppet & puppeteer,” Musk tweeted. Alexander Vindman, who is Jewish, using an old antisemitic slur that depicts Jews as string pullers wielding secret influence over society and as tools of the Israeli government. Only an hour before, however, Musk had attacked former Army Lt. On Sunday, for example, he tweeted a call for “people of different political or other views to engage in civil debate on Twitter.” In practice, however, Musk hasn’t paid more than lip service to the concept. Musk has continued to maintain that his goal is to facilitate “free speech” on the platform - in effect, to energize the marketplace of ideas, the sunlight that traditionally has been seen as a disinfectant against falsehood and corruption in American society, as Louis D. Here’s a proposal to keep him away from the company and possibly save it. Here are my termsĮverybody knows what Twitter’s problem is: It’s Elon Musk.
Banning or suspending accounts for hateful tweets and for the use of antisemitic, racist and Nazi verbiage and imagery was part of that process.īy decimating Twitter’s traffic-moderating team and granting a “general amnesty” to previously suspended accounts, as he announced would be done starting this week, Musk risks making the site less useful and inviting to the vast majority of users.īusiness Column: Dear Elon, I can save Twitter for you.
Musk’s latest tweets embody the least inviting features of Twitter as a social media platform: petulance, truculence, a paranoid view of progressive or liberal policies and a tendency to magnify the most extreme viewpoints and try to make them appear mainstream.īefore his takeover, Twitter staff struggled to curb these manifestations, with uneven success. He has explicitly bought into the right-wing Republican attack on “wokeness,” a fabricated complaint that is the GOP’s way of demonizing diversity and inclusiveness. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
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