It’s not just you who’s seeing too many Elon Musk tweets

One of the hardest jobs in the world has to be being a content moderator at X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. Not because they have a lot of work, since they hardly moderate anything anymore, but because the biggest troll is the company’s own owner, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who is an impulsive social media users. In the past few weeks, Musk has tweeted a fake video of supposed Venezuelan military commanders rebelling against Nicolás Maduro (he later deleted it); posted messages against the Venezuelan dictator, retweeting: “The United States will become Venezuela if Trump is not elected”; published a fake video of Kamala Harris saying she is “a Deep State puppet”; claimed that the White House promotes illegal immigration to import voters (when it is obvious undocumented immigrants cannot vote); and he cheered Donald Trump: “Save our kids!” because the Republican candidate promises to cut funding to schools that teach about racism, sexuality or gender in schools.

No X user can escape Musk’s tweets. “If you use Twitter and you feel like you’ve been seeing a lot of Elon Musk lately, you’re not crazy,” says the two-part documentary Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover. Indeed, Musk’s posts on the network have the highest visibility possible, and he tweets dozens of messages a day. They are often delusional conspiracy theories, and some have more than a whiff of antisemitism: he wrote that George Soros — the far right’s favorite villain — “hates humanity”; and he claimed that Jewish people of sending “hordes of minorities” to Western countries to encourage the great replacement — the conspiracy theory that there is a plot to eradicate the white race. He later tried to apologize by visiting Auschwitz and Israel.

Musk also gave credence to the (homophobic and unfounded) claim that Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was with a prostitute when he was attacked with a hammer in his home. He has called for the prosecution of Anthony Fauci, the scientist who advised the U.S. government during the pandemic. And he has posted countless messages against gender-affirming care for teenagers, one of the obsessions of Musk, who has a trans daughter who disowned her father.

The documentary is made by Frontline, a renowned investigative reporting division of PBS, and highlights, through insider interviews, the crisis that hit the company when Musk bought it in 2022. Musk — who is also the owner of Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink — maintains that Twitter was a dictatorship of progressives, who even dared to suspend Trump’s account, so he turned the rebranded platform into the opposite: a paradise for trolls like him, neo-Nazis, supremacists, QAnon followers, Putin’s bots and sinister incels.

Musk’s most resounding move was his decision to sudden dismantle the platform’s moderation teams, which were already struggling to contain the tide of garbage, and to give general amnesty to accounts suspended for spreading hate speech or inciting violence. “He put up a Bat-Signal to racists, to misogynists, to homophobes,” the documentary says, referring to the sign used to call Batman. After this decision, the number of banned words in content on the platform skyrocketed, with use of the N-word jumping 500%.

Elon Musk calls himself a “free speech absolutist.” But it is not true that X is now more neutral: some posts are amplified to huge audiences (Musk’s, for one) and others are not. Everything is less transparent than ever, because Musk has prevented academic researchers from accessing the platform’s data, as they were able to 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 meant that X users now mostly see advertisements for financial scams or cryptocurrencies.

To prove that there was political censorship when he arrived, Musk leaked internal company documents, including emails from employees, for the benefit of sympathetic journalists. Nothing scandalous came out of that material — the Twitter Files —, although it was controversial to discover that political authorities, especially the FBI, were often in contact with the company to warn of certain content. There’s nothing odd about this if they were warning of risks to national security, from terrorism to disinformation promoted by Moscow.

In one of his most violent moves, Musk targeted former employees by name and surname so that they were lynched on the social network itself and persecuted by the sectarian media. The person most singled out was Yoel Roth, who was the head of Trust and Security at the company. Musk said he was responsible for a “censorship industrial complex” at Twitter, and Roth had to move out after he was doxed. When a Twitter user accused Roth, without any basis, of being a pedophile (a recurring strategy among the far right), Musk responded: “Explains a lot.”

Renee DiResta, an expert from Stanford University who took part in a committee on electoral integrity that issued warnings about disinformation, was also targeted. She was identified as a CIA agent — just because as a computer science student she had been awarded a scholarship in a CIA program, an experience undoubtedly valuable for her profession. Both DiResta and Roth received an unbearable number of threats.

The documentary also explores the broader debate beyond Musk: what does it mean for democracy that content moderation on platforms with such a big influence on politics and journalism is being done behind closed doors, with no transparency. Roth has a good answer to those who claim that there was a leftist bias in Twitter moderation before Musk: he says, it was simply that right and far-right accounts were publishing more fake news and hate speech. Musk should not be equidistant, nor punish leftists to compensate for this, but rather examine each case: “People act like the whole practice was a mystery and was a conspiracy. It wasn’t. It was in the rules.”

The documentary draws a revealing parallel between the platform’s degradation and Musk’s own ideological evolution: in just a few years, the businessman has gone from calling himself a centrist to being one of Trump’s most enthusiastic supporter and a devout believer in the most unlikely conspiracies. In this way, the super-billionaire exemplifies what has happened to a large part of the conservative world, which has metamorphized from defending tradition and morality to an amoral, ruthless and deceitful position. Elon Musk, like Argentine President Javier Milei, represents well that “anti-Christian right” denounced by the very Catholic writer Juan Manuel de Prada. Recently, the magnate posted: “Unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.” On his network, what is fair and right is indeed perishing.

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