Internet

Subterms

    Latest story

    200 Shares25 Views

    While Trump blathers about tariffs and Gaza, Musk is executing a coup d’état | John Naughton

    by

    Way back in 2019, Steve Bannon, then a Trump consigliere, outlined in a TV interview a strategy for managing information. “The opposition party is the media,” he said, “And because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time… All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang.”Since his re-election, Donald Trump has been following this script to the letter, and the media, not to mention the entire world, are feeling punch-drunk. Which is, as Bannon pointed out, enabling other members of the Trump crew to get their stuff done. Really bad stuff too, to which the world has not been paying enough attention.Prime suspect in this respect is Elon Musk, whom Trump has chosen to slash $2tn off US government spending. Late on Friday 31 January, he and a few of his goons gained access to the Department of Treasury payments system – the system that processes the federal spending that makes up more than a fifth of the US economy. More importantly, Musk and a 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who has previously worked for two of his companies, were given the ability to make changes to the payments system, thereby enabling them to stop disbursements of taxpayers’ dollars to recipients that the Trump crowd decide are illegitimate – for example a $367m payment to an outfit called Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service Inc.It’s conceivable, of course, that this payment was an example of the wasteful federal spending that Musk and co are pledged to root out and eliminate. But that is not the point. The point is that all the spending passing through the system constitutes expenditure that has been authorised by Congress. Traditionally, the system was run by apolitical civil servants who had no authority to decide whether a particular payment was unwise or unacceptable. Now, suddenly, that power has been appropriated by an unelected billionaire who spent a quarter of a billion dollars to ensure that Trump was elected.But the Treasury coup is just one part of a bigger story. Musk is not just going after payments, he’s also going after jobs, salaries and the employment status of federal employees. And his strategy mirrors what he did to Twitter after being forced to buy it. At around 5pm on 28 January, millions of US government employees received an email from Musk with the subject line “Fork in the Road”. The message in the email was stark: accept a sweeping set of workplace changes or resign within nine days. It was more or less a replica of the email that Twitter employees received in November 2022 and it signals an intention to do to the federal bureaucracy what he did to Twitter in 2022: hollow it out and subject it to intensive personal control.It’s worth pondering the immensity of what’s happening while Trump blathers on about tariffs, acquiring Gaza, buying Greenland, trolling Justin Trudeau and generally “flooding the zone” with crap. As Mike Masnick, a distinguished tech commentator, puts it: “A private citizen with zero constitutional authority is effectively seizing control of critical government functions. The constitution explicitly requires Senate confirmation for anyone wielding significant federal power – a requirement Musk has simply ignored as he installs his loyalists throughout the government while demanding access to basically all of the levers of power, and pushing out anyone who stands in his way.”Musk’s arrival at the heart of American power signals a new, sinister kind of technocracy – an obnoxious blend of obscene wealth, narcissism, arrogance, determination, IQ and the kind of “solutionism” that believes there is no problem that cannot be solved by technology. He reminds Masnick of “a toddler ‘fixing’ a grandfather clock by removing its pendulum. Yes, the clock needed maintenance – but now it can’t tell time at all. The federal government absolutely needs reform, but what we’re seeing isn’t reform – it’s vandalism dressed up as innovation.”The strange thing is that what most people expected from Trump 2.0 was his usual performative chaos: perhaps a bit less than last time, but chaos nonetheless. What no one saw coming was a tech bro who spotted an opportunity to use AI to re-engineer the US government in the name of the “efficiency” that Silicon Valley worships, and was able to pay hundreds of millions to get into the driving seat. In the bad old days, insurgent colonels would surround the presidential palace with tanks and capture the radio station. Thanks to Trump, Musk didn’t have to worry about the palace, and he already had his own radio station (X), so he went straight to the heart of the matter – the Treasury. What we’re watching is nothing less than a thoroughly modern coup d’état.What I’ve been readingLLMs and a flawed paradigm
    An astute essay by Erik J Larsen on his Substack, Colligo, about the large language models that the tech industry calls “AIs”.How to raise your artificial intelligence
    A fascinating conversation with psychologist Alison Gopnik and AI scientist Melanie Mitchell in the LA Review of Books.The Musk junta Nice satirical piece by Garrett Graff on Doomsday Scenario, imagining how foreign correspondents would report on current events in Washington DC.

    Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk More

    More stories

    • 200 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      To protect US democracy from tyrants, we must protect the truly free press | Robert Reich

      by

      Reliable and independent sources of news are now threatened by growing alliances of oligarchs and authoritarians.The mainstream media doesn’t use the term “oligarchy” to describe the billionaires who are using their wealth to enlarge their political power around the world, but that is what is happening.This is why I write for and read the Guardian, and why I’m urgently appealing to you to support it.During the US presidential campaign, legacy mainstream media – who mostly answer to corporate or billionaire ownership – refrained from reporting how incoherent and bizarre Donald Trump was becoming, normalizing and “sanewashing” his increasingly wild utterances even as it reported every minor slip by Joe Biden.The New York Times headlined its report on the September 2024 presidential debate between the president-elect and Kamala Harris – in which Trump issued conspiracy theories about stolen elections, crowd sizes, and Haitian immigrants eating pet cats and dogs – as: Harris and Trump bet on their own sharply contrasting views of America.Trump also used virulent rhetoric towards journalists. He has called the free press “scum” and the “enemy within”. During his campaign, he called for revoking the licenses of television networks and jailing journalists who won’t reveal their anonymous sources.Come 20 January, Trump and his toadies – including billionaires such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – will have total control over the executive branch of the United States government. Trump’s Maga Republicans will be in charge of both chambers of Congress as well.Most members of the US supreme court, some of whom have been beneficiaries of billionaire gifts, have already signaled their willingness to consolidate even more power in Trump’s hands, immunize him from criminal liability for anything he does, and further open the floodgates of big money into US politics.All of this is sending a message from the United States that liberalism’s core tenets, including the rule of law and freedom of the press, are up for grabs.Elsewhere around the world, alliances of economic elites and authoritarians similarly threaten public access to the truth, without which democracy cannot thrive.It’s a vicious cycle: citizens have grown cynical about democracy because decision-making has become dominated by economic elites, and that cynicism has ushered in authoritarians who are even more solicitous of such elites.Trump and his lapdogs have lionized Victor Orbán and Hungary’s Fidesz party, which transformed a once-vibrant democracy into a one-party state, muzzling the media and rewarding the wealthy.Trump’s success will likely encourage other authoritarians, such as Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party in France; Alternative in Germany, or AfD; Italy’s far-right Giorgia Meloni; and radical rightwing parties in the Netherlands and Austria.Trump’s triumph will embolden Russia’s Vladimir Putin – the world’s most dangerous authoritarian oligarch – not only in Ukraine and potentially eastern Europe but also in his worldwide campaign of disinformation seeking to undermine democracies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEvidence is mounting that Russia and other foreign agents used Musk’s X platform to disrupt the US presidential campaign in favor of Trump. Musk did little to stop them.During the campaign, Musk himself reposted to his 200 million followers a faked version of Harris’s first campaign video with an altered voice track sounding like the vice-president and saying she “does not know the first thing about running the country” and is the “ultimate diversity hire”. Musk tagged the video “amazing”. It received hundreds of millions of views.According to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk posted at least 50 false election claims on X, which garnered a total of at least 1.2bn views. None had a “community note” from X’s supposed fact-checking system.Rupert Murdoch, another oligarch who champions authoritarianism, has turned his Fox News, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post into outlets of rightwing propaganda, which have amplified Trump’s lies.Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, prohibited the newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris. Evidently, he didn’t want to raise Trump’s ire because Bezos’s other businesses depend on government contracts and his largest – Amazon – is already the target of a federal antitrust suit.Bezos’s decision demonstrated that even the possibility of a Trump presidency could force what had been one of the most courageous newspapers in the US to censor itself. Marty Baron, former editor of the Post, called the move “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty”.Citizens concerned about democracy must monitor those in power, act as watchdogs against abuses of power, challenge those abuses, organize and litigate, and sound the alarm about wrongdoing and wrongful policies.But not even the most responsible of citizens can do these things without reliable sources of information. The public doesn’t know what stories have been censored, muted, judged out of bounds, or preemptively not covered by journalists who’d rather not take the risk.In the final weeks before the election, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked his newspaper’s planned endorsement of Harris, prompting the head of the paper’s editorial board to resign. Mariel Garza said she was “not OK with us being silent”, adding: “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up.”Honest people standing up is precisely what resisting authoritarianism and protecting democracy require. Americans and the citizens of other countries must have access to the truth if we have any hope of standing up to tyranny.The Guardian remains a reliable and trustworthy source of news because it is truly independent. That’s why I’m writing this, and why you’re reading it.Unlike other US media organizations, the Guardian cannot be co-opted by the growing alliances of oligarchs and authoritarians. It does not depend for its existence on billionaires or the good graces of a demagogue; it depends on us.Please support the Guardian today. More

    • 213 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Is this (finally) the end for X? Delicate Musk-Trump relationship and growing rivals spell trouble for platform

      by

      Was that the week that marked the death of X? The platform formerly regarded as a utopian market square for exchanging information has suffered its largest exodus to date.Bluesky, emerging as X’s newest rival, has amassed 16 million users, including 1 million in the course of 24 hours last week. Hundreds of thousands of people have quit the former Twitter since Donald Trump’s election victory on 6 November.The catalyst is X’s owner, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who transformed the social media site and used it as a megaphone to blast Trump into the White House.The US president-elect said Musk would head the new Department of Government Efficiency, the acronym for which, Doge, is a pun on the dog internet meme and the Dogecoin cryptocurrency, started as a joke by its creators, which jumped in value after Musk dubbed it “the people’s cypto” in 2021.Musk now sits at the heart of the US government, yet requires no Senate approval for his actions and can continue to work in the private sector. He’s allowed to keep X and his 204 million followers, as well as head his electric car company Tesla and rocket company SpaceX. For the first time in history, a big tech billionaire is now shaping democracy not just indirectly, via his media, but directly.“I’m not aware of any precedent for this approach,” said Rob Enderle, president of the technology analyst firm Enderle, who has worked with companies including Microsoft, Sony and Dell.View image in fullscreenAs recently as 2022, Musk tweeted that “for Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.” He tweeted that “Trump would be 82 at end of his term, which is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America.”Months later, when Musk bought Twitter for $44bn, he fired content moderators and charged for account verification, which meant people could buy influence. Twitter was rebranded to X, shed millions of users and reinstated Trumps’s account, suspended after the White House insurrection in January 2021.The proliferation on X of alt-right diatribe, hate speech and bots, as well as Musk’s own clash with the UK government during the riots in August, have led to mounting disquiet among X users. The Guardian and Observer announced last week that their presence on the site was now untenable and they would no longer post. Stephen King, the author, left, saying it had become “too toxic”. Oscar-winners Barbra Streisand and Jamie Lee Curtis have departed the platform.“X has become effectively Truth Social premium,” said Mark Carrigan, author of Social Media for Academics, referring to Trump’s hard-right social media platform. And the talk in technology circles is that Trump’s Truth Social could be folded into X.If that happens, whose interests take priority? Would Musk suppress criticism of the authoritarian governments he does business with, or promote it? In the Donald and Elon media show, who is the puppet or paymaster?“If that happens, it will be the ultimate amplification machine for Trump’s ideas – a political super-app masquerading as social media,” said James Kirkham of Iconic, which advises brands including Uber and EA Sports on digital strategies. “Forget Facebook or Fox News; the true heart of the GOP’s digital strategy could be X.”“I’m expecting X and Truth Social to merge,” said Enderle. “But this could be one of the efforts that will come between Musk and Trump, given how overvalued Truth Social now is.”The bromance between the world’s two biggest egos is mutually beneficial only as long as the two transactional, power-hungry and impulsive men play nice. Trump is hawkish on China, one of Tesla’s most lucrative markets. Trump essentially campaigned against electric car manufacturing. Trump is protectionist; Musk opposes tariffs. On climate change, they are opposed.Jonathan Monten, a political science professor at UCL, is sceptical over the durability of their relationship.“Musk’s use to Trump was both private money and providing a platform, or using a platform, to a more favourable pro-Trump line,” he said.“It’s unclear what continued purpose or use Musk actually has to him. Yes, it’s sort of this celebrity story, but that’s Trump’s brand. He has one celebrity story today and tomorrow we’ll have another.”The early 2010s were the halcyon days of Twitter when activists, artists, lawyers, academics, policymakers, journalists and specialists of every flavour could connect, share information, exchange ideas and follow events in real time.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenIt would be easy to portray Musk as the bogeyman, but some argue that it was TikTok and the advent of the algorithmic timeline that fundamentally destroyed Twitter. As social media began optimising for scale and for profit at the expense of user experience, algorithms prioritised the “best” content – the content that shouted loudest or was most specifically tailored to users. Curated accounts to follow, and “most recent” content, fell by the wayside.“As much as I think Musk has acted in harmful ways, I think part of this is about the logic of social media platforms as they evolve,” said Carrigan. “The consequences of an advertising-based model incentivise certain ways of organising the platform that create negative effects.”Bluesky, which became the most popular app on the app store on Friday, is the choice for X refugees, although its 16 million users pale in insignificance compared to Meta’s Threads, which reported reaching 275 million monthly active users, and X with about 317 million..View image in fullscreenFor some tech nerds, the X-odus is not something to mourn, but could herald the era of decentralised social networks they have been dreaming of known as the “Fediverse”.Advocates of the “Fediverse” argue that there should be one account for any social media network in the same way that Gmail accounts can email any email addresses, or mobile numbers call users on any other network.In walling off social networks so users can’t leave, the platform has the power. Instead, newer social networks including Bluesky are being built on “ecosystems” that enable them to interconnect.No one knows what will happen to X, with predictions ranging from collapse, to flipping to an anti-Trump platform if Musk and the president lock horns, to becoming a training ground for Musk’s xAI venture. AI could gobble up social media, and xAI is valued at $40bn – almost the price Musk paid for Twitter. More

    • 238 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      A new era dawns. America’s tech bros now strut their stuff in the corridors of power | Carole Cadwalladr

      by

      In hindsight, 2016 was the beginning of the beginning. And 2024 is the end of that beginning and the start of something much, much worse.It began as a tear in the information space, a dawning realisation that the world as we knew it – stable, fixed by facts, balustraded by evidence – was now a rip in the fabric of reality. And the turbulence that Trump is about to unleash – alongside pain and cruelty and hardship – is possible because that’s where we already live: in information chaos.It’s exactly eight years since we realised there were invisible undercurrents flowing beneath the surface of our world. Or perhaps I should talk for myself here. It was when I realised. A week before the 2016 US presidential election, I spotted a weird constellation of events and googled “tech disruption” + “democracy”, found not a single hit and pitched a piece to my editor.It was published on 6 November 2016. In it, I quoted the “technology mudslide hypothesis” a concept invented by Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, who coined the term “disruption” – a process endlessly fetishised in tech circles, in which a scrappy upstart such as Microsoft could overthrow a colossus like IBM.Whoever wins, I wrote, this election represented “the Great Disruption. With Trump the Great Disruptor.” And, for good measure, I chucked in some questions: “Will democracy survive? Will Nato? Is a free and fair election possible in a post-truth world?”View image in fullscreenThat article was the beginning of my own Alice in Wonderland tumble down the rabbit hole. and I reread it with the sinking knowledge that this next presidential term may yet provide those answers. If it seems like I’m crowing, I wish. This isn’t a valedictory “I told you so”: it’s an eight-year anniversary reminder for us to wake up. And a serving of notice: the first stage of this process is now complete. And we have to understand what that means.We’ve spent those eight years learning a new lexicon: “misinformation”, “disinformation”, “microtargeting”. We’ve learned about information warfare. As journalists, we, like FBI investigators, used evidence to show how social media was a vulnerable “threat surface” that bad actors such as Cambridge Analytica and the Kremlin could exploit. PhDs have been written on the weaponisation of social media. But none of this helps us now.There’s already a judiciary subcommittee on the “weaponisation of the federal government” in Congress to investigate the “censorship industrial complex” – the idea that big tech is “censoring” Republican voices. For the past 18 months, it’s been subpoena-ing academics. Last week, Elon Musk tweeted that the next stage would be “prosecutions”. A friend of mine, an Ivy League professor on the list, texts to say the day will shortly come “where I will have to decide whether to stay or go”.View image in fullscreenTrump’s list of enemies is not theoretical. It already exists. My friend is on it. In 2022, Trump announced a “day one” executive order instructing “the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new online censorship regime … and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified”. And my friends in other countries know exactly where this leads.View image in fullscreenAnother message arrives from Maria Ressa, the Nobel prize-winning Filipino journalist. In the Philippines, the government is modelled on the US one and she writes about what happened when President Duterte controlled all three branches of it. “It took six months after he took office for our institutions to crumble.” And then she was arrested.What we did during the first wave of disruption, 2016-24, won’t work now. Can you “weaponise” social media when social media is the weapon? Remember the philosopher Marshall McLuhan – “the medium is the message”? Well the medium now is Musk. The world’s richest man bought a global communication platform and is now the shadow head of state of what was the world’s greatest superpower. That’s the message. Have you got it yet?Does the technology mudslide hypothesis now make sense? Of how a small innovation can eventually disrupt a legacy brand? That brand is truth. It’s evidence. It’s journalism. It’s science. It’s the Enlightenment. A niche concept you’ll find behind a paywall at the New York Times.You have a subscription? Enjoy your clean, hygienic, fact-checked news. Then come with me into the information sewers, where we will wade through the shit everyone else consumes. Trump is cholera. His hate, his lies – it’s an infection that’s in the drinking water now. Our information system is London’s stinking streets before the Victorian miracle of sanitation. We fixed that through engineering. But we haven’t fixed this. We had eight years to hold Silicon Valley to account. And we failed. Utterly.Because this, now, isn’t politics in any sense we understand it. The young men who came out for Trump were voting for protein powder and deadlifting as much as they were for a 78-year-old convicted felon. They were voting for bitcoin and weighted squats. For YouTube shorts and Twitch streams. For podcast bros and crypto bros and tech bros and the bro of bros: Elon Musk.Social media is mainstream media now. It’s where the majority of the world gets its news. Though who even cares about news? It’s where the world gets its memes and jokes and consumes its endlessly mutating trends. Forget “internet culture”. The internet is culture. And this is where this election was fought and won … long before a single person cast a ballot.Steve Bannon was right. Politics is downstream from culture. Chris Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, quoted his old boss to me in my first phone call with him. Elections are downstream from white men talking on platforms that white men built, juiced by invisible algorithms our broligarch overlords control. This is culture now.The Observer’s reporting on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica belongs to the old world order. An order that ended on 6 November 2024. That was the first wave of algorithmic disruption which gave us Brexit and Trump’s first term, when our rule-based norms creaked but still applied.View image in fullscreenThe challenge now is to understand that this world has gone. Mark Zuckerberg has ditched his suit, grown out his Caesar haircut and bought a rapper-style gold chain. He’s said one of his biggest regrets is apologising too much. Because he – like others in Silicon Valley – has read the runes. PayPal’s co-founder Peter Thiel, creeping around in the shadows, ensured his man, JD Vance, got on the presidential ticket. Musk wagered a Silicon Valley-style bet by going all in on Trump. Jeff Bezos, late to the party, jumped on the bandwagon with just days to go, ensuringhis Washington Post didn’t endorse any candidate.These bros know. They don’t fear journalists any more. Journalists will now learn to fear them. Because this is oligarchy now. This is the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite. It’s not a coincidence that Musk spouts the Kremlin’s talking points and chats to Putin on the phone. The chaos of Russia in the 90s is the template; billions will be made, people will die, crimes will be committed.Our challenge is to realise that the first cycle of disruption is complete. We’re through the looking glass. We’re all wading through the information sewers. Trump is a bacillus but the problem is the pipes. We can and must fix this.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Musk steers X disputes to conservative Texas courts in service terms update

      by

      Elon Musk’s X has updated its terms of service to steer any disputes from users of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter to a federal court in Texas whose judges frequently deliver victories to conservative litigants in political cases.New terms of service that will take effect on 15 November specify that any lawsuits against X by users must be exclusively filed in the US district court for the northern district of Texas or state courts in Tarrant county, Texas.It is common for companies to include venue clauses in their terms of service specifying which forum would hear any disputes filed against them. But the choice of the northern district of Texas stands out because X is not located in the district.Following a move from San Francisco, X is headquartered in Bastrop, Texas, near Austin, whose federal court is in Texas’s western district. That district has far fewer Republican-appointed judges than the northern district, which has become a favored destination for conservative activists and business groups to pursue lawsuits seeking to block parts of Joe Biden’s agenda, a tactic Democratic lawmakers say smacks of “judge-shopping”.“It’s hard to imagine that’s unrelated to this new language,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University.X did not respond to a request for comment. Musk, the world’s richest man, has increasingly embraced conservative causes and become a major financial supporter of Donald Trump in his campaign to win the 5 November presidential election.Texas’s northern district already is the host of two lawsuits X has filed after several brands pulled ads from Musk’s platform, including one against liberal watchdog group Media Matters after it published a report that said ads had appeared next to posts supporting Nazism.X, which the billionaire Musk bought in 2022, sued Media Matters last year, alleging the group defamed the platform. The lawsuit will go to trial in Fort Worth, Texas, next year. Media Matters has called the lawsuit meritless.X has also filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing several advertisers of conspiring to stage a boycott, causing it to lose revenue. Both of X’s lawsuits were initially assigned to the US district judge Reed O’Connor, a Fort Worth judge who once declared the Obamacare health insurance law unconstitutional in a ruling that was later overturned. He has since blocked Biden administration policies on gun control and LGBTQ+ rights.The judge, an appointee of George W Bush, the Republican former president, stepped aside from X’s antitrust case in August after National Public Radio reported that financial disclosure reports showed O’Connor had owned shares of another Musk company, Tesla. But the judge has declined to recuse himself from the Media Matters case.O’Connor is one of two active judges in Fort Worth’s federal courthouse. The other is Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee. More

    • 213 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      Elon Musk’s Twitter coup has harmed the right. They are now simply ‘too online’ | Paolo Gerbaudo

      by

      In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s shock victory in 2016, one common explanation for why the Democrats had not seen it coming was that they had succumbed to the social media echo chamber. The fact that many digital platforms, such as Twitter (now X), tended to be dominated by liberals had lured Democrats into a false sense of security. This, so the explanation went, made them complacent, leading to inconsiderate gestures that alienated sections of the electorate: Hillary Clinton’s infamous jab at Trump’s supporters as “deplorables” was often cited as a prime example.With the internet ever more captive to the caprices of timeline algorithms, the risk of echo chambers is even greater in this election cycle. However, it is now Trump and the broader political right that is – to use the internet lingo – “too online”.The rightwing surge seen in many countries’ recent elections, especially in Europe, has been paralleled (and supported) by a significant rise of the right’s influence online. As documented by much academic research on social media and politics, the leading influencers on platforms such as YouTube, X and the instant messaging platform Telegram are rightwing. On many of these platforms, the conversation has increasingly shifted towards rightwing themes and positions, with rightwing messages tending to circulate more widely.This social media hegemony, which has been in the making for many years and was cemented by Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, has now created a right that harbours a similar sense of delusion and complacency to the one that, in the past, has proved so detrimental for progressives.Consider the way vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has brazenly doubled down on his 2021 comment about “childless cat ladies”; or widely ridiculed – and dangerous – online hoaxes about cats and dogs being eaten by Haitian immigrants, which appear to have travelled from Facebook to the mouth of the Republican candidate in a matter of days; or Musk’s creepy rebuke concerning Taylor Swift after the pop singer endorsed Kamala Harris, offering to “give her a child”. Such extreme messaging does cater to the Maga (Make America great again) crowd of true believers – but it comes at the electoral cost of potentially alienating large swaths of the moderate voting-age population.As political scientists have long observed, a party’s rank and file is more ideologically extreme than its electorate. If leaders get trapped in the militant core, they can end up developing an unrealistic appraisal of the opinion of their target voters. This is precisely what 24/7 immersion in social media, with their plebiscitary pseudo-democracy of instant reactions and echo chambers, is all too likely to produce.Obsession with social media and its popularity contest can also lead to unwise choice of political personnel. JD Vance was appointed as running mate by Trump on the back of vocal support from Silicon Valley and the fervour of his social media followers. Yet, Vance is viewed favourably by a miserly 36% of the electorate, compared with 48% support for his opponent Tim Walz, according to a recent USA Today poll. Trump himself has been criticised by allies because of his closeness to internet personality Laura Loomer, a self-described “white advocate” who has built a successful career by catering to far-right digital cesspits.A key factor in this radicalisation spiral has been Musk’s transformation of broadly liberal Twitter into the reactionary X. Spending $44bn on the purchase certainly made no economic sense, but it seemed to make much political sense. Taking the reins of a platform widely recognised as a sort of “social media of record”, or official debating chamber of the internet, capable of shaping the news agenda and public perception, offered the opportunity to fiddle with the formation of public opinion – and this is precisely what Musk did in three waysFirst, he has shamelessly granted himself enormous algorithmic privileges, which reportedly boost his messages by a factor of 1,000. He has used this colossal power of amplification by conversing with, and therefore boosting, hard-right extremist accounts, spreading fake news and publishing AI-manufactured images, such as one showing Kamala Harris in communist attire.Second, by reactivating tens of thousands of accounts – including those of Nazis and antisemites – who had been suspended or banned for violating community guidelines, Musk has goaded liberal and left users to leave the platform out of disgust, therefore effectively shifting the balance of the conversation to the right.Third, there have been the effects of his “blue check” scheme, which has fundamentally transformed the dynamics of participation on the platform. Now, in any conversation, the top replies are from people with blue checks, who appear to be overwhelmingly right-leaning, largely because of the way more progressive users have boycotted the service out of their animosity towards Musk.Musk’s “Twitter coup” has offered a new home to those who had retreated to Maga platforms such as Truth Social and Parler. But in so doing it has also led to the creation of a macroscopic reactionary echo chamber, which feeds into the right’s confirmation bias and self-complacency.Ultimately, the reason why rightwing politicians and their billionaire allies invest so much energy and resources into social media is that these platforms can influence people’s opinions in a more organic way than traditional forms of political communication. The irony here is that in attempting to use its money and power to shift the discursive dial, the right might have inadvertently undermined its own prospects.

      Paolo Gerbaudo is a sociologist and the author of The Great Recoil: Politics after Populism and Pandemic More

    • 175 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Labelling Trump’s lies as ‘disputed’ on X makes supporters believe them more, study finds

      by

      Labelling tweets featuring false claims about election fraud as “disputed” does little to nothing to change Trump voters’ pre-existing beliefs, and it may make them more likely to believe the lies, according to a new study.The study, authored by John Blanchard, an assistant professor from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and Catherine Norris, an associate professor from Swarthmore College, looked at data from a sampling of 1,072 Americans surveyed in December of 2020. The researchers published a peer-reviewed paper on their findings this month in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review.“These ‘disputed’ tags are meant to alert a reader to false/misinformation, so it’s shocking to find that they may have the opposite effect,” Norris said.Participants were shown four tweets from Donald Trump that made false claims about election fraud and told to rank them from one to seven based on their truthfulness. A control group saw the tweets without “disputed” tags; the experimental group viewed them with the label. Before and after seeing the tweets, the subjects were also asked to rank their views on election fraud overall.The study found that Trump voters who were initially skeptical about claims of widespread fraud were more likely to rate lies as true when a “disputed” label appeared next to Trump’s tweets. The findings meanwhile showed Biden voters’ beliefs were largely unaffected by the “disputed” tags. Third-party voters or non-voters were slightly less likely to believe the false claims after reading the four tweets with the tags.Blanchard and Norris had expected in their study that the disputed tags would produce little change in Trump voters with high levels of political knowledge, given that previous research had shown politically engaged people can dismiss corrective efforts in favor of their own counterarguments. The researchers did not predict the opposite possibility: corrective as confirmation. The knowledgeable Trump voters surveyed were so resistant to corrections that the fact-checking labels actually reinforced their belief in misinformation.“Surprisingly, those Trump voters with higher political knowledge actually strengthened their belief in election misinformation when exposed to disputed tags, compared to a control condition without tags,” Blanchard said. “Instead of having no impact, the tags seemed counterproductive, reinforcing misinformation among this group.”Previous studies and research from disinformation experts have argued that directly challenging conspiracy theorists’ beliefs can be counterproductive, leading them to withdraw or double down on their convictions. While Blanchard and Norris state in the study that their findings don’t necessarily prove this backfire effect is universal – since the sample size of Trump voters in the study was relatively low – they’re more confident that disputed tags are less effective the more politically knowledgeable Trump voters become.Social media platforms have tried for years to create various kinds of labeling systems that signal to users when content contains false, misleading or unverified claims. Twitter/X formerly labeled some tweets with false information as “disputed”, a practice it has in recent years replaced with its “community notes” peer review feature and a more lax attitude toward content moderation overall.A larger question that misinformation researchers have sought to answer is whether labels and fact-checks attempting to debunk falsehoods are actually effective, in some studies finding the potential for these warnings to actually backfire. The field of research has implications for social media platforms, news outlets and initiatives aimed at preventing misinformation, especially at a time when political polarization is high and false claims of election fraud are pervasive.The authors assessed political knowledge by asking participants 10 questions to test general understanding of US politics, such as: “What political office is now held by John Roberts?”One limitation of the study is the unique time frame when it was conducted – the height of the 2020 election, when conservatives had more antagonistic views toward Twitter. Since the study was conducted, Twitter has not only gotten rid of the “disputed” tags but undergone a broader change in ownership, content moderation policy and user attitudes. After Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44bn in 2022 and renamed it X, the platform has brought far-right voices back onto the platform, including Trump himself, and taken a rightward turn that has led conservatives to see it in more positive terms.“We can’t pinpoint why disputed tags backfired among Trump voters, but distrust of the platform may have played a role,” Blanchard said. “Given the conservative distrust of Twitter at the time, it’s possible Trump supporters saw the tags as a clear attempt to restrict their autonomy, prompting them to double down on misinformation.” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      A day in Elon Musk’s mind: 145 tweets with election conspiracies and emojis

      by

      It’s just after midnight mountain standard time in the US on 13 August when Elon Musk makes his first post of the day on X, the platform he bought for $44bn when it was known as Twitter. Musk has been tweeting for hours about his interview with Donald Trump, and he will continue into the night before taking a few hours’ break – presumably to sleep – and then logging back on to tweet dozens more times.Over the next 24 hours, Musk will post over 145 times about a range of obsessions, projects and grievances to his 195 million followers. He will share anti-immigrant content, election conspiracies and attacks against the media. He will exchange tweets with far-right politicians, conservative media influencers and sycophantic admirers. He will send a litany of one-word replies that say “yeah”, “interesting” or simply feature a cry-laughing emoji.As a means of showing what Musk promotes online and who he interacts with, the Guardian has taken a granular look at one day of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s posts on X. Musk posted a photo of himself at a “friend’s ranch in Wyoming” on the day in question, and as a result all timestamps of his tweets are assumed to have taken place in that state’s timezone, mountain standard time.The 24-hour snapshot of Musk’s posts, which are largely representative of his average daily output, are a revealing look into how the world’s richest man spends a large part of his day, almost every day. Though Musk receives huge amounts of media coverage for his various legal battles and business ventures, it can be easy for people who are not constantly online to miss just how prolific his output is on X and how extreme the content is that he promotes there. He tweets so often that his own bot scanners have flagged his account in the past. He has replaced Donald Trump as the tweeter-in-chief.If billionaires of the past like Richard Branson and Steve Jobs have projected images of yachting in the Caribbean or standing on stage brandishing their latest tech creation, a review of Musk’s tweets paints a contrasting picture: his default status is staring at a screen, posting. Much as Trump’s vindictive speeches must be heard in full to be believed, Musk’s whiplashing mix of aggrieved political trolling, memes and company hype must be read in sequence to understand the world’s most privileged tweeter.Midnight to 1.18am: Friends of ElonMusk’s first post on 13 August is a 12.14am reply to the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative group Turning Point USA, who opposes trans rights and advocates for Christian nationalism. Musk wants to clarify a point from the previous day’s interview with Trump, whom he is backing for president, and tells Kirk that he believes the climate crisis is real but that sustainable energy technology is on pace to solve it.The exchange is one of multiple times during the day that Musk will have cozy, public exchanges with Kirk and other figures of the international right wing. The billionaire has in recent years formed a sort of symbiotic relationship with conservative media influencers, basking in their praise and in turn amplifying their talking points. Within 30 minutes of Musk’s first post of the day, he will have replied to three separate posts from Kirk with claims suggesting the media is rewriting Kamala Harris’s political history, the government should deregulate industries and that street crime in the US is out of control.By 1am, Musk will have already tweeted 14 times, mostly in exchanges with these kinds of rightwing activists or deferential media influencers like Mario Nawfal – a serial entrepreneur who left behind a series of aggrieved business associates to gain a following hosting live streams on X. Before apparently logging off at around 1.18am, Musk will also respond to the all-beef diet advocate and anti-trans ex-psychology professor Jordan Peterson, who claimed that the initial streaming failure of Musk’s interview with Trump was the result of “traitors at work”. Musk’s response is that, given the prominence of the interview, there was a “100% probability” of an attack.Though Musk has claimed that X is a place for all politics and viewpoints, the Tesla CEO has little to no interaction with leftwing activists or critical journalists. His replies and reposts reflect both his own personal echo chamber on the platform, as well as the broader rightwing ecosystem that he has cultivated as owner of X.Since Musk took over the company in late 2022, far-right and conservative voices have grown on the platform while advertisers and more mainstream A-list users have fled. Republicans are now far more likely to believe that their views are welcomed on the platform and that it has a positive impact on democracy than Democrats, according to a Pew Research Center study from earlier this year, while Democratic voters report far higher levels of harassment.8am to noon: Attacks on the media and far-right anti-immigration postsMusk is tweeting again by 8am, this time thanking the former UK prime minister Liz Truss for her support. Truss, after being memorably ousted from power in less than the time it took for a head of lettuce to go bad, has recently embarked on the rightwing speaking circuit as a Trump supporter, also aligning with Musk. The X owner has established a history of courting rightwing leaders, and later in the day will reply “Grazie!” to the far-right Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini’s praise of Musk’s opposition to European Union regulations.As the morning begins, it becomes clear that Musk has discovered that news outlets’ coverage of his interview with Trump the night before is largely critical – focusing on the live stream’s technical issues, Trump’s falsehoods and Musk’s generally fawning approach toward the former president. Musk’s reaction throughout the day will be to claim that legacy media outlets are liars and financial failures, referring to them as unthinking “nonplayer characters” – a longstanding meme that grew out of 4chan before becoming mainstream among conservatives.“A wall of negative headlines was so predictable. They’re such NPCs 🤣🤣,” Musk says at 8.36am while quote-tweeting the crypto influencer and political shitpost account “Autism Capital”. Three minutes later he will respond to Autism Capital again, claiming that Google only shows leftwing press in its search results.One particular fixation of Musk’s is promoting misleading claims and conspiracies about election fraud, a common conservative talking point in the Trump era. At 9.26am, Musk makes a demand for paper ballots instead of electronic voting machines, echoing a popular rightwing narrative that such machines are used to perpetrate voting fraud. Musk has made dozens of misleading or debunked claims about voting, which have been viewed hundreds of millions of times on the platform and election officials say have begun to spill over into the real world.Musk will continue tweeting at a rapid rate throughout the morning – 19 times over the next 30 minutes alone. These will include separate attacks on CNBC, CNN and other legacy media outlets he accuses of spreading lies. Musk will meanwhile reply with an exclamation mark to a tweet featuring a blogpost called “Did women in academia cause wokeness?”. The blog’s author is a former professor who was ousted from Cambridge University in 2019 after more than 500 academics signed an open letter condemning his work as “racist pseudoscience” and a university investigation found he collaborated with far-right extremists.Musk has long described himself as politically independent, but in 2022 announced that he would no longer support the Democratic party. He has framed his conservative shift as the result of Democrats becoming too far left while his positions remain centrist, but his social media feed instead shows that he frequently promotes and interacts with members of the extreme right.At 9.47am and 10.27am, Musk sends replies to Peter Imanuelsen, a far-right influencer whom the Anti-Defamation League has previously described as being “notorious for his extreme racist, anti-Semitic, Christian fundamentalist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-feminist and conspiracist commentary”. Although Imanuelsen has in recent years disavowed Holocaust denial, he continues to promote far-right, anti-immigrant views.Musk replied “madness” to both of Imanuelsen’s tweets, which were about two British citizens jailed for violating UK laws against posting offensive or menacing material online. The arrests targeted people posting anti-migrant invectives during Britain’s far-right riots, in which masked rioters tried to set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers.Sometimes Musk’s interactions with rightwing influencers are banal, but they also have the effect of amplifying their accounts to the billionaire’s nearly 200 million followers. Musk will reply at 9.08am to a post about how Europe doesn’t use air conditioning from Richard Hanania, a conservative thinker popular among tech moguls who wrote for white supremacist publications in the early 2010s under a pseudonym to argue in support of eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people.Musk also replies with a cry-laughing emoji to a tweet criticizing the media from the early alt-right influencer Lauren Southern. A Canadian activist who has promoted the “great replacement” white nationalist conspiracy theory, Southern was a member of the “talent team” for Tenet Media until early September. A Department of Justice investigation unsealed around the same time as her exit accused Tenet Media of being a Russian-backed propaganda operation that used $10m in foreign money to bankroll rightwing media influencers. Southern and others on the talent team deny having any knowledge that the money was coming from Russia.All of this is before 1pm, by which time Musk will have tweeted about 89 times.While these interactions represent some of the most extreme people that Musk exchanges tweets with, they are by no means aberrations. His most mainstream interaction of the morning comes in a reply to the author Stephen King, in which Musk claims the Guardian can’t be considered objective because it is “utterly incapable of writing anything positive”. He will attack the Guardian at least two other times in the day, telling the rightwing commentator Ian Miles Cheong that it is a “mouthpiece for the state”.One of the reasons that Musk may gravitate towards the crypto influencers, rightwing activists and Tesla fan accounts that fill his feed is that they are some of the few users who can match his prolific output and time spent on the platform. Most people do not have the desire or time to be extremely online, and those that do are often there to pursue some political or financial gain. Almost everyone that Musk interacts with falls into one of those categories, and their accounts function like remoras on the side of Musk’s 195 million-follower shark.Musk will continue tweeting every few minutes until taking a two-hour break between around noon and 2pm. Then he’s back at it, sending a few more sporadic tweets at Nawfal about his Neuralink plans and responding to a thread from the Utah Republican senator Mike Lee. Two o’clock to 4pm is his least prolific time period for posting.4pm to 10pm: Election conspiracies and cries of ‘censorship’It’s 4.12pm, and Musk has tweeted over 100 times since midnight. His latest is a quote tweet of the cryptocurrency account “Doge Designer”, who claims that “the entire media is running a misinformation campaign against Elon Musk”. Musk replies “It’s wild,” adding a cry-laughing face that has become his go-to emoji.Musk’s content production slows somewhat in the evening, but he is still posting multiple times an hour. His attention turns to Brazil, where he has found a nemesis in a supreme court judge who is threatening to block access to X in the country if the platform does not appoint a local legal representative to deal with disinformation takedown requests. Musk describes the judge’s ruling as an act of censorship in a tweet at 6.17pm, and will call the judge an “evil dictator” in weeks to come. Brazil’s supreme court will uphold a ban on X in early September, blocking access to the platform for millions in the country.The Brazil saga reflects a central part of Musk’s online persona, in which he has cast himself as a warrior for free speech against liberal censorship. While this framing ignores that Musk has suspended journalists who criticized him from the platform, complied with censorship requests from governments such as India and throttled traffic to websites he dislikes, Musk’s narrative pervades his Twitter feed. Throughout the day he will attack regulators and anti-disinformation efforts in Brazil, the UK and the European Union.Interspersed among Musk’s various political posts are retweets of people offering support for his business ventures, like @TeslaBoomerMama, whose profile describes herself as a “fierce Tesla retail shareholder advocate” and “fangirl of Elon”. These retweets and interactions with his fans have the effect of a commercial break, and are some of the only posts that don’t have an explicit political message.10pm to midnight: 😂As Musk begins to wind down his day, the frequency of his posts goes back up and he returns to some of the subjects he tweeted about in the morning. He responds with cry-laughing emojis to online influencers, replies to multiple posts about a Haitian migrant accused of rape and sends more anti-media tweets.Musk revisits not only the same themes, but some of the exact same posts and news items that he tweeted about earlier. At 11.12pm he responds with another cry-laughing emoji to the same picture of negative headlines about his Trump interview that he sent a cry-laughing emoji about at 8.36am.Before the day ends, X debuts a beta version of its new AI image generator. Almost immediately, people begin to discover that it will generate images of public figures or sexualized content, unlike other popular image generators. Musk begins using cry-laughing emojis to egg on supporters creating images using the tool – in one case an image with the prompt “make an image of a half cat half woman with boobs”.Over the next few days Grok will be used to generate a range of political content, sexualized depictions of celebrities and violent images. After rightwing influencer accounts use the tool to create images of Taylor Swift and her fans supporting Trump’s candidacy, Trump will cause a wave of controversy by posting the AI images on his Truth Social account. Swift will later cite the incident in an Instagram post throwing her support behind the Harris presidential campaign.Musk’s last post before midnight is celebrating his new image generator, tweeting “Rate of progress of Grok is 🚀 🚀🚀”. He will continue to post into the night, sending almost 50 more tweets over the next three hours.At 3.11am, Musk responds with heart-eyes emoji to an image of him and a shiba inu dog dressed as ancient Roman soldiers generated by Grok. The flurry of replies and posts then goes silent. At 8.01am, he starts posting again. More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Familiar vitriol, and Musk the enabler: key takeaways from Trump’s X interview

      by

      Donald Trump returned to the social media platform that skyrocketed his career for a live discussion with Elon Musk. The former president unleashed familiar rambling, vitriolic talking points to a sympathetic Musk.Here are key takeaways from the event.1. A terribly slow startThe event started about 45 minutes later than scheduled, with listeners struggling to join the live stream. The issues echoed the meltdown that took place during Ron DeSantis’s campaign launch on X last year, which experts at the time attributed to infrastructure issues on the platform after Musk laid off much of its workforce and shut down multiple data centers.On Monday, Musk attributed the delay to a cyberattack, namely, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in which bad actors deliberately flood a website with traffic to overwhelm its servers. That claim could not independently be verified, and it can be difficult to distinguish between a deliberate DDoS attack and a routine outage caused by an influx of legitimate traffic to a site.Trump, meanwhile, attributed the glitches to regular traffic, congratulating Musk for “[breaking] every record in the book with so many millions of people” on the live interview.2. The greatest hits Once the conversation got going, Trump rehashed the greatest hits, and biggest lies, from his rallies – absurdly claiming he oversaw the “greatest economy in the world”, lying about his own record, about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s records, and spreading conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic, his criminal cases and election security.His most dangerous lies were about immigration and climate change. He baselessly claimed that migrants arriving at the US southern border were dangerous, calling them “murderers” as well as “non-productive” people. Trump, who built his political career on promises to “build the wall” at the southern border, has ramped up his anti-immigrant rhetoric lately, and promised a dystopian vision for mass deportations and migrant labor camps if he is reelected.He also dismissed climate change as a threat, saying that rising sea levels would at best create more “oceanfront properties”. That latter point, which he has made before, is, of course, wrong – rising sea levels are more likely to destroy beachfront property, devastating coastal communities. Sea level rise is, however, an actual driver of global migration – as it creates climate refugees. 3. Trump derides HarrisTrump also seemed to sharpen his critiques of Kamala Harris, who he has struggled to attack as her nascent campaign gains momentum. The former president attempted to paint Harris as a “radical” leftist, falsely suggesting that she wanted to ban fracking and defund the police. He also came at her with classic sexism, insisting on calling her by her first name, rather than by her title or surname, as he does for Joe Biden. He also lingered on her looks, saying that she was a “beautiful woman” who looked like Melania Trump, his wife.And for a measure of intersectionality, he also repeatedly mispronounced Harris’s south Asian first name.  4. Musk the enablerThroughout the conversation, the two men lavished praise and admiration on each other. Trump, who has been a critic of electric vehicles, called Musk’s Teslas “incredible”. Musk, meanwhile, nodded along and agreed as Trump that it was wrong to “vilify” the oil and gas industry. At the beginning of the event, the tech billionaire had noted his belief that “no one is themselves in an adversarial interview” and that the conversation was “aimed at kind of open-minded independent voters who are just trying to make up their mind”.But in the end, the softball format seemed like it was aimed more at those who had already bought into Trump and Musk’s rightwing politics. At the end, Musk told Trump he was “on the right path”. More