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Elon Musk is using ‘free speech’ on X to encourage white supremacists [1]
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Date: 2023-10
Elon Musk rarely states his own political views outright on X (formerly Twitter), other than to make vague nods in favour of “centrism” and “free speech” – one of his favourite topics – or to adopt a general “anti-woke” attitude.
The owner of X has denounced the “woke mind virus” and even taken a dig at the free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, calling it “Wokipedia” (presumably because of its editors’ attempts to maintain fact-based objectivity).
This “anti-wokism” is bad enough, of course. It’s a position that clearly animates the American right at its core and all the way to its extremes (even if some who style themselves centrist or liberal have also adopted an “anti-woke” stance in recent years). A case in point: Florida’s notoriously authoritarian governor and Republican primary presidential candidate Ron DeSantis loves to boast that “Florida is where woke goes to die.”
But Musk sometimes goes further than broad-brushed “anti-woke” sentiments – for example, in highlighting supposed threats of genocide against white people. He is also a very open supporter of racist commentator and ex-Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson, a key figure in the American mainstreaming of the white supremacist ‘great replacement theory’.
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Musk’s interactions with toxic X users also do much to directly encourage, draw attention to and imply some degree of agreement with conspiracy theories, as well as anti-LGBTQ and antisemitic speech. To find these more damning tweets, one often has to look at Musk’s replies rather than his original posts.
For example, under a conspiratorial tweet that reads in part “The Justice Dept. is actively undermining the prosecution of the president’s son while seeking to incarcerate his political rival. Biden is destroying the legitimacy of our democratic system”, Musk simply replied: “True.” He also regularly interacts with the conservative Christian ‘satire’ account The Babylon Bee, which is notorious for its anti-trans stance. Under a recent post headlined “Woman Driving Alone in Carpool Lane Claims Preferred Pronoun is ‘They’”, he replied with a laughing emoji.
White supremacists
Even more concerningly, Musk recently quote-tweeted a Dutch white supremacist and far-right influencer who last year tweeted: “White lives matter and it’s ok to be white. Stop being afraid to say that.” The tweet Musk quoted was part of the recent white supremacist #BanTheADL hashtag campaign – an attack on the Anti-Defamation League, a US organisation that focuses on combating antisemitism. The hashtag trended on the Labor Day holiday weekend in the US, which is also when three neo-Nazi groups held hate-filled demonstrations in Orlando, Florida, including outside the Disney World theme park and resort.
The original tweet read in part: “The fact that #BanTheADL is trending shows how done people are with the ‘we’re labeling everything we don’t like as hateful/racist/dangerous/far-right’ BS.” In response, Musk asked: “Perhaps we should run a poll on this?” An X user replied: “Yes. The ADL, ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] and SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] are radical left wing hate groups.” Musk responded with: “It would be difficult to describe them as centrist,” adding: “Would be hilariously ironic for the Anti-Defamation League to lose a defamation lawsuit.”
To be sure, there are some valid criticisms of the ADL from the left, especially regarding its tendency to conflate opposition to Israeli politics and anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Awkwardly, the group’s current head, Jonathan Greenblatt, welcomed Musk’s planned takeover of Twitter in glowing terms, calling Musk – even more awkwardly – “the Henry Ford of our time” (Ford was not just a leading industrialist; he was also a virulent antisemite).
The ADL’s flaws aside, the #BanTheADL campaign was all about racist white grievance and bad-faith defences of “free speech”. During the campaign, Musk also replied to another white supremacist (one who has downplayed the brutality of slavery as practised by white people) by claiming that “ADL has tried very hard to strangle X/Twitter.” Musk later directly threatened to sue the ADL, claiming its efforts to expose hate speech on X had driven advertisers away, as if the problem were merely in the labelling of antisemitism on the site and not in Musk’s own decision to let hate speech run rampant.
Even as he threatened to sue the ADL and indicated he would share records of the ADL’s communications with X with hate account Libs of TikTok, Musk asserted he was “against antisemitism of any kind”. But if Musk is genuinely concerned about right-wing political violence, there’s no trace of this concern in his social media. Instead, he gives direct encouragement to white supremacists and other purveyors of hate in a way that can only further embolden the far right and their fellow travellers.
LibsOfTikTok focuses primarily on anti-LGBTQ and especially anti-trans hatred, and – as I noted in last week’s openDemocracy column – institutions targeted by the account have faced bomb threats. Musk’s friendliness with LibsOfTikTok underscores that antisemitism, misogyny, conspiracy theories, and anti-LGBTQ animus are all of a piece, as was also evident in neo-Nazi demonstrations that took place in Florida on Saturday.
Neo-Nazis
Neo-Nazis are clearly emboldened to take action on the streets of America at present – particularly in Ron DeSantis’s Florida, where neo-Nazi activities have been occurring frequently for months. The local neo-Nazi group that demonstrated outside Disney World on Saturday seems to have targeted Disney because of the corporation’s public opposition to DeSantis’s ‘don’t say gay’ law.
The group, known as the Order of the Black Sun, played to mainstream right-wing “groomer” conspiracies by placing a “Pedo World” banner in front of a Mickey Mouse display at the complex’s entrance, replacing the ‘O’s on the banner with stars of David as a means of conflating child abuse with Jewishness. The banner also featured an anti-gay version of Disney’s classic Mickey Mouse ears symbol, with stars of David for eyes and the words “butt fucker” underneath. Other signs featured vicious antisemitic caricatures, and members of the group also flew swastika flags and a Ron DeSantis banner.
Neo-Nazis have included DeSantis signs and banners in their demonstrations before. When asked to respond, DeSantis tends to deflect with accusations that Democrats and/or the media are trying to “smear” him, rather than to simply and unequivocally denounce the support of neo-Nazis, although he has called them “jackasses”. In any case, it’s no wonder neo-Nazis feel welcome in Florida.
The way DeSantis enables the worst elements of the authoritarian, racist right in Florida, who are clearly emboldened by his “war on woke”, parallels the way that Musk enables the worst trolls on X. He joins them in denouncing “the woke mind virus” and stoking conspiracies related to white grievance, even if he stops short of making overtly anti-Black or antisemitic statements. Nevertheless, he allows hate, conspiracy theories, and right-wing propaganda – including Russian war propaganda – to proliferate on X.
Last week I argued that the decision of Big Tech companies to back away from policing political disinformation on social media would help to fuel right-wing political violence during the 2024 election cycle in the US, and recent developments have only further convinced me of this. If we allow the fig leaf of “free speech” to protect DeSantis and Musk for their culpability in cultivating the right-wing rage that fuels political violence, we will only see more such violence in the months and years ahead.
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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/elon-musk-desantis-x-twitter-florida-political-violence-white-supremacists-neo-nazis/
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