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      in US Politics

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

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      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

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      in Elections

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

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      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

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      in US Politics

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

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      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

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      in US Politics

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

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      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

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      in US Politics

      Trump rehashes vitriol and falsehoods in rambling talk with Musk – as it happened

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      Elon Musk says X is suffering from “a massive DDOS attack” that he implies has delayed the broadcast of his interview with Donald Trump on the platform:DDOS stands for distributed denial of service and occurs when a site is flooded with traffic in an effort to make it inaccessible.This blog is closing now – thanks for following along. You can read our full story on the interview here:Donald Trump sat down with billionaire Elon Musk on Monday for a rambling and vitriolic interview that revisited many of the former president’s most divisive talking points.The interview on X, which is owned by Musk, got off to an inauspicious start, with technical issues that initially prevented many users from watching the conversation. Musk blamed the delay on a “massive” cyber-attack, but the cause of the glitch was not entirely clear.After the interview started more than 40 minutes late, Trump began the conversation by recounting the failed assassination attempt against him last month at Musk’s request. Although Trump previously said he would only share the story once at the Republican convention last month, he again discussed in detail his brush with death at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, which he said he would visit again in October.“It was a miracle. If I hadn’t turned my head, I would not be talking to you right now, as much as I like you,” Trump told Musk.Trump then pivoted to discussing his usual anti-immigration views, warning about the “rough people” attempting to enter the country through the US-Mexico border.“These are people that are in jail for murder and all sorts of things, and they’re releasing them into our country,” Trump said. Extensive research has uncovered no link between immigration and higher levels of crime.Trump proceeded to attack his opponent Kamala Harris as the “border tsar” of the Biden administration, even though Democratic officials and immigrant rights experts have contested that characterization of her policy portfolio. He repeatedly mocked Harris as a “radical” Democrat who had “destroyed” California when she served as the state’s attorney general and later its senator.And he bizarrely complimented Harris for looking “beautiful” on the cover of Time magazine, comparing her to his wife, Melania, while noting that the image was a sketch.Hello, this is Helen Sullivan wrapping up our coverage of that interview.Let’s take another look at Trump’s claim on the numbers. His campaign Twitter / X account claimed it was the biggest interview in history, which is wrong by tens and tens of millions of viewers / participants.That interview had around 1.2 million people watching, which is less than the average Fox prime time viewership in May this year.At one point, Trump tried to claim that 60 million people were watching, and Musk did not correct him, but laughed nervously, and said instead that a hundred million would probably watch the recording.A few that were much bigger than that interview: Princess Diana and Martin Bashir in 1995, which had at least 28 million.Or Oprah and Michael Jackson in 1993, which about 90 million people watched worldwide.Emily Maitlis’s 2019 interview with Prince Andrew was watched by more than two million people.Donald Trump’s conversation with the world’s richest person, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, was less of an interview and more of a chat between two ideologically aligned men who felt at ease talking for more than two hours before an audience of about a million accounts. After a belated start caused by what Musk said was a cyber-attack, they discussed Trump’s experience after an assassin opened fire at his rally in Pennsylvania, Musk’s views on the climate crisis, and the former president’s take on just about anything. One thing they did not do was break much news. The ex-president stuck to well-worn rhetoric on familiar topics, with little push back from Musk, who has endorsed his presidential campaign.Here are some highlights:

      Trump leveled baseless attacks against migrants, as he often does, describing them as “murderers”.

      The former president said that in October, he would return to Butler, the Pennsylvania town where a gunman opened fire on his rally last month.

      Musk prodded Trump to establish something called a “government efficiency commission”. The ex-president replied with praise for the Tesla boss’s penchant for laying off workers.

      In an attack that you can expect to hear from Republicans a lot in the months to come, Trump decried Kamala Harris as “a San Francisco liberal”.

      Harris’s campaign replied that Trump’s “extremism” is a “feature not a glitch of his campaign”.
      Now that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are off the air, Kamala Harris campaign spokesman Joseph Costello had this to say about their interview:
      Donald Trump’s extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda is a feature not a glitch of his campaign, which was on full display for those unlucky enough to listen in tonight during whatever that was on X.com. Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.
      After just over two hours, Donald Trump has wrapped up his interview with Elon Musk.The conversation was wide-ranging and often rambling, with the former president and the Tesla CEO expressing their admiration for each other and discussing their political views. Trump repeatedly exaggerated various ills the country faced, as well as his record as president, while also attacking Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.The interview’s scheduled start time was delayed by about 40 minutes due to what Musk said was a cyber-attack on X. There were no further technical glitches once the conversation started.Conservative accounts are circulating these photos, saying it’s Trump talking with Elon Musk on X:Are they wrapping up? It’s been nearly two hours, and the conversation seems to be heading in that direction.The two men are trading compliments, with Musk saying to Trump: “Here’s to an exciting, inspiring future that people can look forward to and be optimistic and excited about what happens next. And that’s the kind of future that I think you will bring as president. And that’s why I endorse you.”To which Trump replied: “Well, I appreciate that. That endorsement meant a lot to me. Not all endorsements mean that much. To be honest, your endorsement meant a lot.”One wonders what endorsements Trump doesn’t think much of.There are more than a million people listening in to Trump’s interview with Musk, according to X’s counter.The number caught the attention of the former president: “I’m looking at the numbers, you get a lot of people listening. I hope you don’t get nervous, because you got a lot of people listening to you right now.”There was a brief pause as Trump seemed to read the number of people listening in. He then remarked: “I congratulate you. Do I get paid for this or not?”Trump seemed to imply that the listener count was up to 70m, but that’s much higher than what X’s counter shows.In an attack that you can expect to hear repeated by Republicans quite a lot over the next three months, Donald Trump assailed Kamala Harris as “a San Francisco liberal” who “destroyed” California.“She’s going to be worse than him,” Trump said, referring to Joe Biden.“She is a San Francisco liberal who destroyed San Francisco, and then as attorney general, she destroyed California,” he then said of Harris, who was the city’s district attorney before becoming the state’s prosecutor.But, as he often does, the former president overreached, implying that the sun shined over the famously sunny state no longer. “We’re talking about the sun. There’s nothing better than California. She has destroyed that,” Trump said.Fact checks: the economy and CovidTrump returned to many of his favorite lies about the economy while he was president, claiming he had the “best economy ever, maybe in the world”. That’s a complicated claim to fact check, because it is simply so broad. But to start – GDP growth was so-so under Trump, though unemployment was low. Even before the pandemic, when the economy was generally good – it was far from the most booming time in US history, let alone in the world …Trump blamed the Covid pandemic on China. There is still no determination on the origins of the pandemic.Musk and Trump are now discussing the climate crisis, with the Tesla CEO saying his views on the subject are “moderate in this regard”.Musk, who credits much of his wealth to the success of his electric car company, argues that fossil fuels are still essential for prosperity, but warns that their supplies are finite, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide poses its own risk.Trump replied by telling Musk that he fossil fuel-generated electricity powers the factories that produce his Teslas: “I’ve heard in terms of the fossil fuel, because even to create your electric car and create the electricity needed for the electric car, you know, fossil fuel is what really creates that at the generating plants … so you sort of can’t get away from it at this moment.”Trump mentioned AI – and the amount of energy it requires. And he was kind of right.As companies seek to build out AI technologies, the US will “need a lot of tremendous electricity, like almost double what we produce now for the whole country, if you can believe it”, Trump said.Indeed, the new computing infrastructure needed to power tech companies’ ramping up of AI technologies will eat up a lot of energy.As my colleagues reported last month, Google admitted that its data centers, a key piece of AI infrastructure, had helped increase its greenhouse gas emissions by 48% since 2019. Because AI programs are so complex, they require more energy than other forms of computing. It’s hard to nail down exactly how much.The conversation took a chummy turn after Musk brought up establishing something called a “government efficiency commission”.The Tesla CEO is clearly among the ranks of those who think that Washington overspends and under-delivers, and has gently prodded Trump to do something about that, if re-elected.“I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and just ensures that the taxpayer money, the taxpayers’ hard earned money, is spent in a good way. And I’d be happy to help out on such a commission,” Musk said.“I’d love it for you. You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump replied, in an apparent reference to Musk’s penchant for pushing out staff at companies he’s taken over, including X. More

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      Elon Musk’s X suffers tech failures at start of Donald Trump interview

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      As a high-profile conversation between Donald Trump and Elon Musk was about to begin, users of X, formerly Twitter, were confronted with the message: “This Space is not available.”Spaces, X’s livestreaming audio feature, was the chosen forum for the dialogue, but it wasn’t working. Clicking on the link to the broadcast, hosted by Trump’s dormant @RealDonaldTrump account, froze the site and rendered it unusable. Tweeters said they couldn’t dial in; some said their browsers had crashed.Musk, who owns X, wrote: “There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down.” The rest of X appeared to be functioning normally.The interview was due to begin at 8pm eastern US Time; Musk said he would work through the technical difficulties to start half an hour later. The issues seemed to resolve in the interim, and clicking the link allowed users to join the broadcast.When X’s hold music finally stopped at 8.30ET, a rustling was heard from Trump’s microphone. Then silence overtook the livestream for another 10 minutes. Both the former president and Musk were muted. The interview started shortly after, with X eventually displaying more than 1 million concurrent listeners.Musk said: “The attack saturated all of our data lines. We think we’ve overcome most of that. As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say.”Trump said he was happy with the mishap.“You broke every record in the book with so many millions of people. We view that as an honor,” he told Musk.The day before the event, Musk said he would “do some system scaling tests” in advance of the chat. On his feed, several of his tweets were labeled “streaming test”. However, an awkward silence descended on X when the interview was supposed to begin. One Washington Post reporter tweeted “So how’d they go” in reply to Musk’s disclaimer about the stress tests.The failure to launch the Trump interview is bad advertising for Musk’s X as a technological innovator, and for the social network as a functional advertising vehicle. The company filed suit last week against its some of the world’s largest advertisers for taking their business elsewhere, alleging an illegal monopoly.At times, Trump’s arguments also put Musk into a difficult corner, for example when the former president doubled down on his lies about climate change and Musk – the head of an electric carmaker – did little to correct him.X has endured similar failures before. The snafu with Trump’s interview mirrors the launch of Ron DeSantis’ ill-fated presidential campaign on the platform in May 2023. That conversation, too, was mired in technical difficulties. The Florida governor was nearly inaudible at the startamid harsh feedback noise. X users said their apps crashed or logged them out as they tried to listen. The feed cut out repeatedly, then began half an hour late with less than a tenth of the original listeners. Musk admitted the event had “broken the Twitter system”.The night of DeSantis’s floundering launch, Trump posted on his X competitor, Truth Social: “Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER!” Vice-President Kamala Harris’s campaign, which maintains its own Truth Social account, reposted Trump’s remarks the night of the former president’s delayed conversation with Musk.After Musk purchased Twitter for $44bn in 2022 and renamed it X, he gutted the staff, leaving just 20% of employees, with skeleton crews in place in key areas such as site reliability. In November of that year, he reinstated Trump, who had been banned from Twitter after the January 6 Capitol attack. Advertisers have fled amid a documented rise in hate speech on the social network. The billionaire has touted X as riding the cutting edge of politics and freedom of speech. More

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      Bitcoin price hits six-week high after Trump backs cryptocurrency

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      Bitcoin has hit its highest level in more than six weeks after Donald Trump said at the weekend he would end the “persecution” of the crypto industry if he wins the US presidential election.The cryptocurrency’s price rose by more than 3% on Monday to peak at about $69,745, the highest since 12 June when the currency changed hands at more than $69,800.The increase comes after supportive comments from Trump at the Bitcoin 2024 convention in Nashville, Tennessee, where he said on Saturday he would make the US the world’s cryptocurrency leader and embrace a more pro-bitcoin stance than his rival, Kamala Harris.The former president said: “I pledge to the bitcoin community that the day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s anti-crypto crusade will be over … If we don’t embrace crypto and bitcoin technology, China will, other countries will. They’ll dominate, and we cannot let China dominate. They are making too much progress as it is.”He also said he would sack the chair of the US financial watchdog the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), on the first day of his presidency if he won the election. “On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler,” Trump said, to cheers of approval from the audience.Gensler is a noted sceptic about cryptocurrencies, despite aiding them in January by approving exchange-traded funds (ETFs) – a basket of assets that can be bought and sold like shares on an exchange – that track the price of bitcoin.The SEC chair said in a statement approving the ETFs that bitcoin was a “speculative, volatile” asset used for illegal activities including ransomware and terrorist financing. Since 2023 the SEC has launched more than 40 crypto-related enforcement actions.Speaking at the bitcoin convention, Trump said he would establish a crypto presidential advisory council and create a national “stockpile” of bitcoin using cryptocurrency the US government held that was largely seized in law enforcement actions.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Never sell your bitcoin,” Trump said. “If I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration, the United States of America, to keep 100% of all the bitcoin the US government currently holds or acquires into the future.”The Financial Times also reported on Saturday that Harris’s advisers had approached top crypto companies to try to “reset” the relationship between the Democratic party and the sector. Approaches had been made to the Coinbase crypto exchange, the stablecoin company Circle and the blockchain payments group Ripple Labs, the FT said. More

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      Kamala Harris memes are all over the internet. Will tweets and TikToks turn into votes?

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      In a series of events over 24 hours that would have been unimaginable a week ago, Kamala Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket, secured the backing of Joe Biden and key leaders, brought in a record-breaking $81m, and became the face of brat summer.“kamala IS brat,” pop star Charli xcx declared on Sunday, a reference to her new album released last month that has launched countless memes declaring it the season of the brat. A brat, in the British singer’s own words, is “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it”.Brat was having a moment, Kamala was having hers, and the two came together in cultural union via a tidal wave of posts – largely from younger Americans – like videos with the pop star’s music over clips of the vice-president’s frequently shared coconut tree remarks.Harris’s campaign quickly embraced the memes, adopting a lime green Twitter/X background in the same aesthetic of the Brat album. The internet went wild.Now the question is what it might mean for Harris’s chances come November. Will tweets and TikToks turn into votes?While this year’s election drew plenty of memes and online engagement, there was little excitement about the rematch of Joe Biden, 81, and Donald Trump, 78, and instead a pervasive sense of cynicism.Young people had reported feeling disengaged and apathetic about the upcoming elections, and US politics in general. In a US News-Generation Lab poll of voters 18-34 from early July, 61% of respondents agreed that the upcoming election would be among the most important in history, but nearly a third said they would probably not or definitely not vote.Of those who said would not or were unlikely to vote, 40% said it was because they didn’t like any of the candidates, and 15% said they were turned off by politics.After Biden’s widely criticized debate performance, and amid growing calls for him to bow out of the election, there was a flurry of Harris-related memes. The KHive, as Harris fans have been called, seemed rejuvenated by the renewed interest around her.The memes and posts surged after Biden announced that he would step aside, and that he was endorsing Harris, including videos of her with music from Chappell Roan and Kendrick Lamar, and along the way the tone of the content shifted from oftentimes just ironic and silly to something more earnest.“It went from being just shitposting to shitposting into reality and as it became more and more real people also understood what power this could actually hold and what this could actually mean,” said Annie Wu Henry, a digital and political strategist who has worked with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive congresswoman from New York, and Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman.She views the furor around Harris among younger voters as both about Harris but also something larger. “It’s about the potential for something new, it’s about a political party that can be agile and make adjustments based on what they are hearing from the people.”“I think it is really exciting and bringing a lot of energy and hope to folks that haven’t felt this way in some time and for young people that maybe haven’t had a moment of hope like this in politics before.”The buzz online is bringing results, said Marianna Pecora, the communications director for Voters of Tomorrow. The gen-Z led liberal advocacy organization had its best fundraising day in history, Pecora said, and saw more apply to join a chapter or start a chapter in two days than in the last month combined.Priorities USA, one of the largest liberal Super Pacs, told the Guardian on Tuesday that after Biden endorsed Harris, it saw a notable increase in the share of young people who said they plan to vote in the upcoming election.It’s also brought a sense of joy and excitement not often seen in politics, Pecora said, particularly for a generation that came of age during one of the most difficult periods in recent history from growing political turmoil and the rise of far-right extremism in the US to Covid-19.“We’ve had this history as young people not seeing a system that really works for us and not having too many figureheads that are really fighting for us,” said Pecora, who was 13 when Donald Trump was elected.While polls show that Harris – like Biden and Trump – has struggled with favorability ratings, she has helped elevate issues that are important to younger voters, including abortion rights and Israel’s war on Gaza.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris, a biracial woman who is set to be the first Asian American and black woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket, is an appealing candidate to gen Z voters, who are among the most diverse generation in US history, said Yalda T Uhls with the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at the University of California, Los Angeles.This year 41 million members of gen Z will be eligible to vote, and nearly half of them are people of color.A report from the center published last year that surveyed people from ages 10 to 24 found that adolescents are most interested in hopeful uplifting content of people beating the odds. “I feel like that’s the Kamala story,” Uhls said. That same study also found that in their entertainment, older teens were most interested in seeing a Black woman as the hero of a story.“Maybe young people have been waiting for this. They have been waiting for a candidate they feel is representative of them,” said Uhls, who co-authored the report and also grew up with Harris.But while Harris’s entry into the race has energized young voters, they also want to see real policy proposals that align with the issues most important to them, experts say.“Whether this translates to a large surge in youth voter turnout in November may come down to whether the new Democratic nominee also can convince young voters of a credible plan to address the existential threats they see in their everyday lives,” said Sarah Swanbeck, the executive director of the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans, pointing to the climate crisis, protections for democratic institutions, and economic policy that will improve social mobility.The events of this week have marked a special moment for young women, said Pecora. Young women for decades have been the arbiters of culture, she said, and this moment is tying the culture of young women to the vice-president.“We know we’re the margin of victory and that is translating into how this is happening online. It’s no coincidence to me that young women who have become the base of the Democratic party, who are fighting for reproductive freedom, their culture is the culture that is becoming mainstream with this movement,” she said. (Conservatives have frequently railed against the growing number of unmarried women supporting Democrats.)“It’s showing that we have power and sway in this world where young women are typically told wait your turn or let a man do it.”Uhls, the UCLA scholar who has studied gen Z, said she predicts the enthusiasm of the last few days will make a difference in November.“I think it’s going to translate to votes,” Uhls said. “Young people get most of their news and political information from social media. Some of them have written about this but they are thrilled that someone is actually marketing to them.”Still, Harris’s path to the White House is tough. The latest poll from PBS News/NPR/Marist found that if the election were today, 46% of voters would support Trump and 45% would vote for Harris, a close race though within the margin of error. The outcome of November’s election is expected to be decided by a few thousand voters in a handful of swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.But, Pecora said, the discourse about the election that is unfolding online is also happening elsewhere between friends and family at dinner tables and in classrooms, Pecora said.“That engagement is taking itself into people’s conversations, into their homes, into their communities. That’s where voters are turned out,” she said. “The energy that’s happening online is not siloed to the internet. It translated to dollars, and those dollars are translating to real organizing capacity and an ability to turn out young voters in November.”And so, Democrats say, there’s hope. More