You are the fuel that energises Elon Musk’s hate machine

April 19, 2024April 20, 2024 by Ketan Joshi In Uncategorized 29 Comments

Twitter is dead. It has been replaced by something we have never seen before: a blend of highly engaged, influential media/political accounts posting happily inside the newly formed infrastructure of a seething, hate-soaked racist right-wing fever swamp.

My late-2022 assumption that moral disgust would cause a rapid collapse in X’s user base was wrong. I should have predicted this, knowing that assumption is the mother of all fuckups. X has become as mean-spirited as predicted, but it hasn’t collapsed, and it hasn’t suffered a major loss of its user base.

We don’t have the luxury of sitting back and observing the consequences of this hybrid social media monster. Least of all in a year where half of the world is voting in elections. X’s shallow decline needs to be a steep cliff.

X is a machine you can use to promote hate and lies to a massive audience

It’s the two year anniversary of the moment Elon Musk began the process of buying Twitter. Since officially taking ownership of the site, Musk has been twisting every dial in head office to benefit right-wing, libertarian and racist ideologies, and disadvantage the opposite. He has reinstated a wide range of the most vile hate preachers, misogynists and white supremacists.

He has used his account (with hundreds of millions of followers) to promote ‘great replacement theory’, anti-semitism, generalised racism and misogyny (often through the indirect means of replying with a single word or emoji, but in doing so boosting the original post to millions of people in a few seconds).

This paragraph from Ed Zitron’s fantastic newsletter post on Musk is still only a tiny fraction of all the right-wing nastiness rising in volume and intensity on X:

Racist slurs have soared since Musk bought the website, and he's repeatedly endorsed the racist "Great Replacement Theory" despite telling Don Lemon he "doesn't subscribe" to it, posting a vile video warning about a "flood" of illegal immigrants entering America to "replace" white people. Musk retweets right wing psuedo-science, said that a post claiming that jewish people "push hatred against whites" was "the actual truth" before apologizing and telling advertisers to go fuck themselves, and suggested that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion would lead to plane crashes. His most recent posts include reposting a cringeworthy right wing comedian's song about racism, an endorsement of a Joe Rogan segment alleging that squatters can steal people's houses, a complaint about America's "uncontrolled immigration," and a post outraged at democrats for voting against a bill that would allow state authorities to enforce federal immigration law while defunding "sanctuary cities" that protect illegal immigrants.

There are near-daily stories about the significant impact of uncontrolled and often actively boosted disinformation on X. Most recent was a horrific mass murder attack in a shopping centre in Sydney, in which a young IT professional was wrongly named by a bunch of massive, high-follower accounts as the perpetrator. Those posts were briefly amplified by mainstream right-wing TV channels, in Australia.

Only a few days after the Bondi attack, a teenager approached a bishop live-streaming a sermon and stabbed him in the face. The video was shared widely across social networks, including X: the shocking, graphic video helping to inflame tensions in the community and trigger a riot. After being requested by the Australian government to take the videos of the Bishop’s stabbing down, X is refusing. “The Australian censorship commissar is demanding *global* content bans!”, said Musk, in response. “Global takedown orders go against the very principles of a free and open internet and threaten free speech everywhere”, said X’s corporate communications team.

Musk is an unashamed hypocrite on this point, actively nuking accounts that any fascist or nationalist regime requests be taken down, and only fighting back against centre or left governments. As Paris Marx writes, Musk has been pushing back against the Brazilian government’s requests to remove disinformation. In India, “Twitter/X has become an important tool of censorship and information control for the far-right Hindu-nationalist government of Narendra Modi….Musk has allowed the removal of posts critical of Modi, along with the suspension of journalists and political opponents”.

Verified, “premium” accounts have been found by NBC News to be actively posting direct, explicit neo-nazi content. “The result is that X is bringing Nazi sympathizers in from the dark corners of the internet to a massive platform where they can pay to amplify their content”, wrote NBC. The Center for Countering Digital Hate has done plenty of work on this, discovering worsening content moderation failures. For their trouble, they were dragged through the courts in a failed SLAPP suit by Musk.

One of Musk’s first actions was to weaponise Twitter’s verification system, letting anyone buy a blue-tick for a low monthly fee, which boosts their posts and pushes their replies to the top. Recently, Musk began forcing blue tick subscriptions on active X users, including many in the climate and energy space, as a way of faking widespread uptake in the hope others will pay the fee to sign up. Some were so ashamed they selected the option to hide the gifted tick: but Musk is about to remove that option, too.

I still have plenty of climate and energy friends actively posting there. Almost always at the top of their replies is an inane, hateful, irrelevant or lie-packed post from an X subscriber, who has paid for top billing. It seems to be an almost guaranteed feature of most posts on the still-buzzing social site. As a recent example, Australian environment campaigner Ben Pennings posted a picture of his young daughter campaigning for the Greens party, and received several hundred extremely abusive replies or quote-tweets over the subsequent hours.

The website is a paradise for science deniers and every other species of climate disinformation animal on the site. A recent report by Climate Action Against Disinformation shows X comfortably scores the worst, when it comes to having policies that control against climate-related lies.

About this time last year I wrote about how quickly Musk’s takeover resulted into climate deniers and delayers being boosted on the site, with some analysis of how follower counts changed between selected big accounts in the two groups. The researcher who supplied the data, Travis Brown, was kind enough to update the datasets, which I’ve shown below (Brown is currently engaging in his own legal fight, alongside digital rights organisation HateAid, to have research access to the site restored after his account was banned).

The results tell a similar story: climate deniers and delayers have seen their accounts grow materially since July last year; far greater than accounts supporting climate action, who have either lost followers or grown very little.

We can also see a snapshot of posting activity, and it shows that the denier/delayer group is far more active (though a few pro-climate-action accounts remain relatively active in this small sample):

While there has been a clear reduction in post volume generally among pro-climate-action voices, it’s also clear there hasn’t been a universal decision to completely stop contributing to the site.

The full transformation of left-leaning Twitter into alt-right X has had some impact on the level of broader engagement with the site: but not a lot. This NBC News graphic, for instance, was shared recently as showing X’s decline, but to me it screams that more than three quarters of US Twitter’s former users are sticking around. Globally, the drop has been only 15%.

When I log on to check my direct messages, it is genuinely very lively. There are still thousands of climate and energy folks posting there every single day, including a wide range of big name accounts who have either only slightly reduced their usage, or in many cases, increased it.

Elon Musk is bad at nearly everything, but something he’s good at is turning left wing things into right wing things. When Tesla started shifting towards being an explicitly right-wing brand, many customers who’d bought the car to signal left-leaning liberal values were shocked and conflicted.

There is none of the same nervousness with X. The site’s left-wing users are far more comfortable than Tesla’s left-wing customers. They don’t need or want bumper stickers. It’s a problem, because it should be shameful to spend much of your time on a right-wing social media site.

Imagine 4Chan, or TruthSocial, except populated by major global institutions, world leaders and politicians, trusted critical agencies, progressives, activists and celebrities. Nothing like this has happened before. X is something completely new.

The bar that was built around its drinkers

There’s a parable doing the rounds. The story goes: a bartender is telling a guy about how if you let one Neo-Nazi into the bar you run, they’ll bring their friend next time. Those Nazis will bring their friends. Pretty soon you’re running a Neo-Nazi bar. So you can’t waver. “You have to shut them down” from the start. The parable has been extended to describing those who refuse to leave Elon Musk’s website: “I hang out at the Nazi bar because all my friends are there”.

It’s sort of true, but with a nuance that I think makes it darker. The people hanging out at X aren’t deciding to visit the bar.

Twitter turned into X brick by brick, while most inside failed to notice, or tried not to. They didn’t come to this place – the place came to them. The old bar has been destroyed, redesigned and rebuilt around its occupants. The sign has changed, the door policies have changed, and the attitude of the bouncers has changed. With clear and open intention, it has become a Nazi bar, and the only stories the bartender tells are about how immigration is a plot to replace the white race.

X is a completely new hybrid social media site: with the seething fever swamp race hate of Gab, but the trust, reach and influence of major centre and left-wing institutions and people. No social media site of this scale or influence has ever become such an explicitly operated hate and disinformation engine before. Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and other sites all fail in their own ways: but none of them actively and openly promote right-wing ideology like X does.

The predictions of a rapid decline and collapse of the site have proven wrong – for what I think is a simple reason.

“Bad-faith scapegoating around the [Bondi] attacker’s identity shows Australian media needs to shake its addiction to Elon Musk’s rapidly toxifying platform”, wrote Guardian Australia’s Van Badham, a few days ago. In the space of the past year, Badham has posted approximately 18,000 posts on Elon Musk’s social media site; about 60 a day and just under 2,000 in the past month.

X persists because too few people want to leave it. It is not uncommon to see someone post there about a damaging change to moderation policies, a viral lie, or some hateful content, and then continue to contribute to the site. As if they were somehow not part of the sequence of events that led to the damage done. They are not stuck in traffic – they are traffic.

Progressives, left-wingers and liberals continue to supply free content and free engagement to Elon Musk’s company, which then sells their eyeballs to a still substantial number of advertisers. That sustains the baseline level of cash required to keep shifting the rules of the site so that they favour Musk’s cruel, hateful and racist right-wing ideology.

If you are still contributing to X, you are the energy-dense fuel that Musk is pouring into his hate machine. This is true no matter how complex your post-hoc rationalisations are.

If you have a large following, and decent influence, you should stop posting on X, make your account private and begin growing your community from the ground up on whatever alternative you prefer. If you do leave, your new digs will feel empty, and it’ll take time to find your friends. You will be tempted to go back: it will take months to adjust to the lack of loud background noise.

A common belief is that buying Twitter was a loss for Musk. Financially, sure: but he doesn’t care about that. Ideologically it has been a major victory. Not because Musk is good at winning, but because Twitter’s millions of hangers-on are bad at losing.

I mean that literally: it is a loss, to leave. When I left Twitter in its final days, I lost contact with friends, a stream of information that is useful for my work and a vast broader network of climate and energy people. If I want any of those things back, I have to engage in a disgusting moral bargain with a disgustingly rich racist.

It’s important to be clear here: there is no chance a critical mass of people will ever leave X without a major shock to the system. Musk is not a smart person but on some level he recognises that many of those who have stuck with X through every single depraved shift in its centre of gravity will happily stick with X as it gets significantly more hateful and harmful. But that doesn’t mean you should stay, and prolong its decline.

I’m willing to bet that in April 2026, X is still around. But it needs to be forcibly downsized into a right-wing echo chamber like 4Chan or TruthSocial, with zero trust, prominence or reliance among media outlets, companies and government institutions in particular.

If it does end up cut down to size, it’ll probably be the result of a mix of regional (probably EU) regulations, advertising revenue losses and user departures.

But it’s all taking too long. If you’re still there, you can help make it faster. Take a sip and look around. Maybe tap your friends on the shoulder, too. “Hey, I think we need to leave”. You really do.