It’s been at least a few days since we last dumped on far-right Twitter owner Elon Musk for being a lying, terrorism-coddling, neo-Nazi-boosting fascist, so let’s do it again just for funsies. The Washington Post has received new internal documents from Twitter documenting the company’s struggle to deal with rising calls for violence from Donald Trump supporters in the days before and after the Jan. 6 coup attempt, including a video call in which company lawyers and safety specialists argued over where the line should be, for language that appeared to toe the line between “coded incitements” and implicit threats.
We already know the outcome of that video call from other internal Twitter documents. Management rebuffed moderator requests to crack down harder on such language, even as pro-Trump protesters were streaming into Washington, D.C., to join the Trump-lead “march” meant to intimidate lawmakers into nullifying Trump’s election loss on their own say so. Twitter “didn’t want to go too far” when policing phrases like “locked and loaded” in the runup to Trump’s rally, explained senior management on the call.
So the company sat stewing, unwilling to take any broader actions to tamp down violent rhetoric as Trump’s mob assembled itself. By the next day, lawmakers and the U.S. vice president were fleeing from a weapon-carrying mob that launched a mass attack on law enforcement, breached the building, and were intent on hunting Trump’s enemies down.
The Post’s headline merely notes that the video “undercuts” claims that Twitter was censoring Trump supporters in the runup to the insurrection without mentioning who’s been pressing those false claims the hardest. It’s new Twitter owner Elon Musk whose entire purchase of the social platform appears to have been a ploy to custom design his own little fascist fan club. Musk has gone to great lengths to simply lie his ass off about the supposed censorship of Trump’s rabble.
Musk attempted to prove this censorship by giving a handful of hoax-promoting “journalists” access to cherry-picked company information. Pro-insurrection House Republicans have fallen over each other in attempts to one-up their own conspiracy theories about just how cruel Twitter was to the insurrectionist crapsacks who responded to a not particularly close election loss by vowing to be “locked and loaded” for attempts to erase that election entirely. From the beginning, though, Musk has had reams of documents showing that the previous Twitter team bent over backwards for years to allow Trump to break whichever of the company’s public safety rules he wanted to. Even as pro-Trump militia teams were checking into Washington, D.C., area hotels on the eve of Jan. 6, with calls to violence flooding the site and causing panic in the company’s safety and moderation teams, company leaders were still more focused on maintaining an image of political neutrality than they were on working to prevent the violence.
Even after the violence was over and multiple people lay dead, Twitter’s leaders still balked at banning Trump, even as he used the platform to glorify the insurrectionists. Twitter only acted days after Facebook and Instagram already had, and then only after company lawyers began throwing words like “terrorist group” around as they warned that calls for pro-Trump violence were still growing.
But Musk has been lying about this, even with the same video recordings and documents likely shoved into a corner of his supposedly sleep-in office, because Musk is himself a propagandist who immediately fell in very hard with the fascist far-right as soon as he himself became the company’s new rulebook. Musk unbanned white supremacist accounts. He joined in pushing anti-vaccine and anti-masking conspiracy theories. He continues to suck up to promoters of white nationalism; bashes scientists, educators, and the press; and has in fact settled himself into the whole fascist nest of propaganda and invented enemies.
Musk was always known as a professional fabulist, someone whose showboating promises at Tesla or SpaceX or the tunnel-digging realm were already wearing thin as his “genius” persona scrubbed off to reveal a man who subsisted mostly on government largess and the sheer gall of his own false promises. Once he had purchased his own social media platform and even went so far as to order it tweaked to make his own personal megaphone louder than anyone else’s, it became immediately clear that self-promotional lies and propaganda were who Musk was in his very core.
Musk, like most of his new pro-insurrection friends, knows he’s lying about Twitter being unfair to Trump supporters as Trump supporters geared up to commit nation-rattling violence. He just doesn’t care. He’s a narcissist whose pandemic lies, “self-driving” lies, “Twitter bias” lies, and other fabrications are all constructed as justification for him to do whatever damaging thing he wants, and for you to praise him robustly for having the audacity to do it.
So there you go. There’s yet another entry in our ongoing series that might as well be called “Elon Musk Is Hurting America.” There’s an actual video out there of Twitter’s previous legal and safety teams hashing out whether they need to crack down on calls for violent revolution after the big enormous fascist babies lost one election and declared it the end of their whitebread world. Also of Twitter management refusing to grant the safety team permission to do it even as Trump’s mob was assembling.
Musk won’t care, but the rest of us ought to because it shows the man is willing to lie, a lot, to boost his own personal vision of maybe-benevolent, maybe-not-benevolent fascism. We get that a lot with supposedly free-thinking libertarians. It never takes much to push them into white nationalism or to explanations of why violent revolution is Good, Actually. If you’ve decided that the problem is the government won’t let you, personally, break whatever public safety rules you want to break, you’re already halfway to authoritarianism’s core premise. If you’ve decided that and are willing to spend tens of billions of dollars to get your way, you’re halfway there again.
The rest is just negotiating who gets to be the authoritarian, and who get to be the lackeys. From Musk’s obsession with collecting online points from the likes of (checks notes) “catturd2,” the man seems to be aiming for lackey.
Hey, even the ultra-rich have fetishes.
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