One of the hardest jobs in the world has to be that of a content moderator at X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. Not because they have to do much, since they don’t repress much anymore, but because the most prominent troll is the company’s own owner, the very impulsive Elon Musk. richest man in the world. Just this week, Musk has tweeted a fake video of supposed Venezuelan military commanders rebelling against Maduro (he later deleted it), among many other messages against the dictator of Caracas; he shared that “The United States will become Venezuela if Trump doesn’t win”; has posted a video fake in which the impersonated voice of Kamala Harris admits that she is “a puppet of the deep state”; has stated that the White House promotes Illegal immigration to import voters (when it is obvious that they cannot vote); and has cheered on Donald Trump: “Save our children!”because the Republican candidate promises to ban teaching about racism, sexuality or gender in schools.
No X user can escape the tweets of the platform’s boss. “If you think you see too many tweets from Elon Musk, you’re not crazy,” the documentary says. Twitter in the era of Elon Musk, The two-part series, which Movistar Plus+ has released, is in fact highly visible on the internet, and he tweets dozens of messages a day. They are often delusional conspiracy theories, and some of them give off a stench of anti-Semitism: he wrote that George Soros, the favourite villain of the ultras, “wants to destroy humanity”; he shared as “truth” that Jews are encouraging what they call the “great replacement”, the replacement of the white majority by immigrant minorities (after the latter he wanted to be forgiven by visiting Auschwitz and Israel). He also gave credence to the (homophobic and unfounded) version that Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was with a prostitute when he was attacked with a hammer in his home. He called for the prosecution of Anthony Fauci, the scientist who advised the US government during the pandemic. And he has posted countless messages against gender transition in adolescents, one of the obsessions of someone who has a trans daughter with whom he broke off all relations.
The report is a production of Frontlinethe renowned investigative reporting division of PBS, and highlights through internal testimonies the earthquake unleashed in the company when Musk bought it in 2022. The head of Tesla, Space X and Starlink maintains that Twitter was a dictatorship of the progressives, who even dared to cancel Trump’s account, so he turned the renamed X into the opposite: the paradise of trolls like him, neo-Nazis, supremacists, QAnon, Putin’s bots and the sinister incel. The most resounding message was the sudden dismantling of the moderation teams, already insufficient to contain the tide of garbage, and a general amnesty for accounts suspended for spreading hate speech or calls for violence. “It was like a bat signal “For misogynists, racists and homophobes,” the documentary says, referring to the image that, in fiction, is projected in the sky to attract Batman. At that time, the content with forbidden words skyrocketed, such as the one cited here as “N” (from Nigger, the most insulting term possible for black people), which was used 500% more often.
Elon Musk calls himself a “free speech absolutist.” But it is false that X is now more neutral: certain tweets are amplified to huge audiences (the boss’s for starters) and others are not. Everything is less transparent than ever, because Musk prevented academic researchers from accessing to the platform’s data as before. The entrepreneur did not hesitate to block the accounts of serious journalists who reported on the company and, in particular, on the flight of major advertisers, a phenomenon that has led to Twitter users now seeing mostly advertisements for financial scams or cryptocurrencies.
To prove that there was political censorship when he arrived, Musk leaked a massive amount of internal company documents, including emails from employees, for sympathetic journalists to eat. From that material, the Twitter Files, Nothing so scandalous came out, Although it was controversial to discover that political authorities, especially the FBI, had fluid contact with the company to warn of certain content. Nothing strange if they warned of risks to national security, from terrorism to disinformation promoted by Moscow.
In one of his most violent moves, Musk targeted some former employees by name and surname for a mass lynching on the social network itself and persecution by sectarian media. The most singled out was Yoel Roth, who was the company’s head of Trust and Safety, whom he held responsible for a “censorship industrial complex” and who had to leave his home after his address was published in the tabloids. When a Twitter user accused Roth, without any basis, of being a pedophile (a recurring strategy among the ultras), Musk responded: “That explains a lot.” He also took aim at Renee DiRestaa Stanford University expert who served on an election integrity committee that issued disinformation alerts. She was identified as a CIA agentand all because as a computer science student she had received a scholarship for an agency program, an experience undoubtedly valuable for her profession. Both received an unbearable amount of threats.
The documentary includes an interesting background debate that goes beyond the protagonist: what does it mean for democracy that moderation (identification of toxic content, either to remove it or to label it) is carried out behind closed doors and without transparency on platforms that are so influential in politics and journalism. Yoel Roth responds well to those who claim that before Musk there was a leftist bias in Twitter moderation: it was simply the right and far-right accounts that were publishing more hoaxes and hate messages. He should not be equidistant, nor punish leftists to compensate, but examine each case: “It was not a conspiracy, it was the rules.”
The program draws a revealing parallel between the degradation of the platform and the ideological evolution of Musk himself, who has gone from declaring himself a centrist in just a few years to being Trump’s most enthusiastic supporter and a devout believer in the most unlikely conspiracies. The super-millionaire exemplifies what has happened to a large part of the conservative world, that metamorphosis from the defense of tradition and morality to an amoral, ruthless and lying position. Elon Musk, like Javier Milei, represents well that “anti-Christian right” that denounces the very Catholic writer Juan Manuel de Prada. One of the tycoon’s last tweets said: “Christianity will perish if there is no more courage to defend what is just and right.” On his network, what is just and right is perishing.
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