Elon Musk is changing how people communicate (and think) online
Musk’s disastrous handling of X highlights the importance of media literacy and critical thought.
In the first week of September, the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered a nationwide ban on accessing X (AKA Twitter). The ban was issued as Elon Musk, the owner of the platform, refused to ban accounts that were spreading election misinformation and violating Brazil’s hate speech laws. This event is just another result of Musk’s hell-bent crusade against the “woke leftist” mob for the right of freedom of expression on his platform.
When Musk acquired the then called Twitter back in the fall of 2022, he stated that he considers himself as a “free speech absolutist” and he wanted Twitter to act as a space where fellow users can express their beliefs freely, without the threat of being censored by the “authoritarian woke mob”. As soon as Musk was reigned as the new owner of Twitter, the usage of the N-word skyrocketed by 500%.
Since then, hate rhetoric has run rampant across the platform, resulting in advertisers pulling out of the platform and now countries blocking their citizens from accessing the site. Not only is X’s fight for “free speech” falling flat, it also exposes the role financial, socioeconomic, and even racial privilege plays in deciding who controls the dissemination of information. To fully understand how X got to this point, we must look at the timeline of Musk’s Twitter posts, from tweeting innocuous memes to becoming the echoer of right-wing political rhetoric.
Elon Musk: From celebrity shitposter to alt-right’s biggest icon
In 2018, Elon Musk was at the forefront of pop-culture. From smoking weed on Joe Rogan’s Podcast to dating the edgy electronic artist Grimes, Musk became every guy’s ultimate fantasy and captured the imagination of pop culture like never before. 2018 was also the time he started tweeting more frequently, everything from Tesla updates to outdated memes. He balanced the image of being the richest man alive and just a “regular Joe” who watches anime and shares dank memes like the rest of us.
Over the next two years he’d tweet glimpses of his growing right-wing politics to his millions of followers who viewed him as a genius. When the COVID-19 lockdown shut down the whole world in 2020, Elon Musk’s twitter account was one of the main sources of misinformation surrounding the virus. He “predicted” that the Coronavirus would be “eradicated” a month after the lockdown was enforced. He then went on to call for the imprisonment of Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the leaders of the US coronavirus task force. He then started to echo right-wing sentiments against immigrants, minorities and the LGBTQ+ community. He once simply tweeted “pronouns suck” which garnered hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets. By the end of 2022, he gained nearly 100 million followers through his political takes. It’s clear that he found an audience of chronically online conservatives who take his word as gospel, which enables him to consistently post harmful information.
Killing the Bird
In 2022, Musk took over Twitter and immediately gutted half the employees working for the company, including the content moderation team that managed misinformation and hate speech. He then reinstated prominent neo-Nazis and right-wing accounts like Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate. He also monetized the blue verification badge, which diminished any credibility the badge gave to journalists, public figures, and academics as a source of accurate information, perpetuating the toxic link between financial privilege and credibility. In 2023, Twitter Blue subscribers were rewarded with shared ad revenue if their tweets drew a lot of traffic. This created a career for trolls to “rage bait”, or tweet highly polarizing content with the aim of inciting anger for the sake of online engagement.
Misinformation and our youth
Online echo chambers on platforms like X, Instagram and TikTok are legitimizing hateful rhetoric to youth. A study published by the British Journal of Developmental Psychology detailed that teens as young as 14 years of age are the most susceptible group to fake news. Teachers that were surveyed reported that many of their students were complicit in Holocaust denialism, and that they believed COVID was a government ploy to control the masses.
With advancements in AI technology, it’s increasingly more difficult to tell apart a deep fake and a real image. And it doesn’t help that teens and young adults look up to Elon Musk as an objective truth teller. As Musk keeps giving the world stage to grifters and conspiracy theorists, we are at risk of having a society that doesn’t know who to trust.
It’s important for media literacy to be implemented in school and university curriculums. Educators must teach youth how to navigate their way through a digital web of lies. It’s important especially for children, who might have parents that are victims to fake news, to have a place where they can develop their media literacy skills objectively and be taught to not always believe information they read, to always look for peer-reviewed sources, and to think about who benefits the most with the spread of misinformation.
As Musk’s erratic way of running X enables harmful ideologies to spread, it’s essential for the public to gain the skill of spotting and rejecting fake news, and to not allow a few billionaires to control the way we communicate to each other.
Associate Sports Editor (Volume 50) — Bilaal is in his fourth year working towards a double major in Biology and Psychology and a minor in Professional Writing & Communication. When Bilaal isn’t procrastinating doing his assignments, you can catch him singing along to early 2000s RnB, watching Seinfeld, or coming up with absurd satire pitches he can get away with.