Like many of you, I have grown sick of discussing noted Afrikaner fascist supervillain Elon Musk, and given his various battles with the U.K government and EU regulatory bodies over his presumed "right" to incite fascist violence on the social media platform he purchased entirely for that purpose, I don't think Musk's quest to normalize fascist ideology and put his thumb on the scale to elect fascist politicians in the Pig Empire is the widely underreported story it used to be.
With that having been noted however, I'd like to briefly push back on the idea that "everybody knows" what Musk's game is by now, and that his efforts largely consist of preaching to the choir; an idea firmly rooted in the false assumption that anyone who isn't a fascist has long since exited Twitter (or X, if you insist.) Even setting aside the fact that this position is pretty ridiculous given that Pig Empire governments, politicians, news outlets, and celebrities all continue to maintain an active presence on "Daily Stormer the Social Media SiteTM," the empirical data simply doesn't back that position up. If we are to presume Musk is somehow only speaking to fascists, then the data suggests we as a society have a *much* bigger fascism problem than anyone is prepared to admit:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/08/election-disinformation-elon-musk-x-trump-harris/
Election Disinformation From Elon Musk Is Drawing Billions of Views on X
"The report from CCDH, a nonprofit organization focused on protecting civil liberties and holding social media companies accountable, found that 50 false or misleading posts shared by Musk on X between January 1 and July 31 of this year racked up a staggering 1.2 billion views. The group categorized the posts under three main themes: false claims that Democrats are “importing voters” through illegal immigration (the bulk of the content that researchers examined); false claims that voting is vulnerable to fraud; and a manipulated video, also known as a deepfake, of Vice President Kamala Harris.
According to the report, while independent fact-checkers found the content in all of those 50 posts shared by Musk to be false or misleading, none of the posts in question contained a “community note,” X’s user-generated fact-checking system that the company promise’s can contextualize “potentially misleading posts.” Just this week, Musk claimed in a post on X that community notes offer “a clear and immediate way to refute anything false in the replies,” adding, “the same is not true for legacy media who lie relentlessly, but there is no way to counter their propaganda.”
Imran Ahmed, CEO of the CCDH, said in a statement accompanying the report that Musk “is abusing his privileged position as owner of a small, but politically influential, social media platform to sow disinformation that generates discord and distrust.”
Yes, you read that correctly, at the time the CCDH report was published, fifty posts by Musk that are essentially election disinformation or fascist propaganda have received 1.2 billion (with a b) views; no doubt aided by Musk's manipulation of the Twitter algorithm to make his own posts the most popular content displayed on the platform. Furthermore, I think it's important to understand that this report looked at just fifty posts by only Musk himself; it says literally nothing about all of the other influencers, politicians, and nazi propagandists working to spread fascist ideology on the platform whatsoever. Finally, while I'm certain that there are a great number of chuds viewing Elon's posts, the reality is that pretending it's only chuds doing so simply cannot be supported by the raw data; whether X users like it or not, they're seeing Musk's fascist content by design.
Look, fascists have been producing fascist propaganda for a very long time, and they do so for a reason - because if enough people consume that propaganda, it works to spread and normalize fascist ideology, creating permission structures for fascist political activity. You are not immune to propaganda, and neither are the millions and millions of unsuspecting people consuming nazi ideology on Twitter/X.
This in turn means that Elon Musk and his social media platform are a legitimate fascist threat to Pig Empire society, and the vast portions of our establishment who remain on the platform, drawing unsuspecting readers to a place where they will be exposed to the fascist content Musk's site is disseminating, are part of the goddamn problem. Given the fact that Musk now appears to be actively suppressing content that disagrees with his reactionary, revanchist worldview, it is simply no longer acceptable for establishment figures in the Pig Empire to claim they must keep producing content for Musk (which is what posting on Twitter ultimately does) because "that's where the people are." Plunging the world into a nazi hellscape for views and likes, is simply not an acceptable tradeoff for anyone, anymore.
#Fascism #ElonMusk #Propaganda #SocialMedia #Twitter #X