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      First came the bots, then came the bosses – we’re entering Musk and Zuck’s new era of disinformation | Joan Donovan

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      I’m a researcher of media manipulation, and watching the 2024 US election returns was like seeing the Titanic sink.Every day leading up to 5 November, there were more and more outrageous claims being made in an attempt across social media to undermine election integrity: conspiracy theories focused on a tidal wave of immigrants plotting to undermine the right wing, allegations that there were millions of excess ballots circulating in California, and rumors that the voting machines were already corrupted by malicious algorithms.All of the disinformation about corrupt vote counts turned out not to be necessary, as Donald Trump won the election decisively. But the election proved that disinformation is no longer the provenance of anonymous accounts amplified by bots to mimic human engagement, like it was in 2016. In 2024, lies travel further and faster across social media, which is now a battleground for narrative dominance. And now, the owners of the platforms circulating the most incendiary lies have direct access to the Oval Office.We talk a lot about social media “platforms”. The word “platform” is interesting as it means both a stated political position and a technological communication system. Over the past decade, we have watched social media platforms warp public opinion by deciding what is seen and when users see it, as algorithms double as newsfeed and timeline editors. When tech CEOs encode their political beliefs into the design of platforms, it’s a form of technofascism, where technology is used for political suppression of speech and to repress the organization of resistance to the state or capitalism.Content moderation at these platforms now reflects the principles of the CEO and what that person believes is in the public’s interest. The political opinions of tech’s overlords, like Musk and Zuckerberg, are now directly embedded in their algorithms.For example, Meta has limited the circulation of critical discussions about political power, reportedly even downranking posts that use the word “vote” on Instagram. Meta’s Twitter clone, Threads, suspended journalists for reporting on Trump’s former chief of staff describing Trump’s admiration of Hitler. Threads built in a politics filter that is turned on by default.View image in fullscreenImplementing these filtering mechanisms illustrates a sharp difference from Meta’s embrace of politicians who got personalized white-glove service in 2016 as Facebook embedded employees directly in political campaigns, who advised on branding and reaching new audiences. It’s also a striking reversal of Zuckerberg’s free speech position in 2019. Zuckerberg gave a presentation at Georgetown University claiming that he was inspired to create Facebook because he wanted to give students a voice during the Iraq war. This historical revisionism was quickly skewered in the media. (Facebook’s predecessor allowed users to rate the appearance of Harvard female freshmen. Misogyny was the core of its design.) Nevertheless, his false origin story encapsulated a vision of how Zuckerberg once believed society and politics should be organized, where political discussion was his guiding reason to bring people into community.However, he now appears to have abandoned this position in favor of disincentivizing political discussion altogether. Recently, Zuckerberg wrote to the Republican Jim Jordan saying he regretted his content moderation decisions during the pandemic because he acted under pressure from the Biden administration. The letter itself was an obvious attempt to curry favor as Trump rose as the Republican presidential candidate. Zuckerberg has reason to fear Trump, who has mentioned wanting to arrest Zuckerberg for deplatforming him on Meta products after the January 6 Capitol riot.X seems to have embraced the disinformation chaos and fully fused Trump’s campaign into the design of X’s content strategies. Outrageous assertions circle the drain on X, including false claims such as that immigrants are eating pets in Ohio, Kamala Harris’s Jamaican grandmother was white, and that immigrants are siphoning aid meant for Fema. It’s also worth noting that Musk is the biggest purveyor of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories on X. The hiss and crackle of disinformation is as ambient as it is unsettling.There are no clearer signs of Musk’s willingness to use platform power than his relentless amplification of his own account as well as Trump’s Twitter account on X’s “For You” algorithm. Moreover, Musk bemoaned the link suppression by Twitter in 2020 over Hunter Biden’s laptop while then hypocritically working with the Trump campaign in 2024 to ban accounts and links to leaked documents emanating from the Trump campaign that painted JD Vance in a negative light.Musk understands that he will personally benefit from being close to power. He supported Trump with a controversial political action committee that gave away cash to those who signed his online petition. Musk also paid millions for canvassers and spent many evenings in Pennsylvania stumping for Trump. With Trump’s win, he will need to make good on his promise of placing Musk in a position on the not-yet-created “Department of Government Efficiency” (Doge – which is also the name of Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency). While it sure seems like a joke taken too far, Musk has said he plans to cut $2tn from the national budget, which will wreak havoc on the economy and could be devastating when coupled with the mass deportation of 10 million people.In short, what we learn from the content strategies of X and Meta is simple: the design of platforms is now inextricable from the politics of the owner.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis wasn’t inevitable. In 2016, there was a public reckoning that social media had been weaponized by foreign adversaries and domestic actors to spread disinformation on a number of wedge issues to millions of unsuspecting users. Hundreds of studies were conducted in the intervening years, by internal corporate researchers and independent academics, showing that platforms amplify and expose audiences to conspiracy theories and fake news, which can lead to networked incitement and political violence.By 2020, disinformation had become its own industry and the need for anonymity lessened as rightwing media makers directly impugned election results, culminating in January 6. That led to an unprecedented decision by social media companies to ban Trump, who was still the sitting president, and a number of other high-profile rightwing pundits, thus illustrating just how powerful social media platforms had become as political actors.In reaction to this unprecedented move to curb disinformation, the richest man in the world, Musk, bought Twitter, laid off much of the staff, and sent internal company communications to journalists and politicians in 2022. Major investigations of university researchers and government agencies ensued, naming and shaming those who engaged with Twitter’s former leadership and made appeals for the companies to enforce its own terms of service during the 2020 election.Since then, these CEOs have ossified their political beliefs in the design of algorithms and by extension dictated political discourse for the rest of us.Whether it’s Musk’s strategy of overloading users with posts from himself and Trump, or Zuckerberg’s silencing of political discussion, it’s citizens who suffer from such chilling of speech. Of course, there is no way to know decisively how disinformation affected individual voters, but a recent Ipsos poll shows Trump voters believed disinformation on a number of wedge issues, claiming that immigration, crime, and the economy are all worse than data indicates. For now, let this knowledge be the canary warning of technofascism, where the US is not only ruled by elected politicians, but also by technological authoritarians who control speech on a global scale.If we are to disarm disinformers, we need a whole of society approach that values real Talk (Timely, Accurate Local Knowledge) and community safety. This might look like states passing legislation to fund local journalism in the public interest, because local news can bridge divides between neighbors and bring some accountability to the government. It will require our institutions, such as medicine, journalism, and academia, to fight for truth and justice, even in the face of anticipated retaliation. But most of all, it’s going to require that you and I do something quickly to protect those already in the crosshairs of Trump’s new world order, by donating to or joining community organizations tackling issues such as women’s rights and immigration. Even subscribing to a local news outlet is a profound political act these days. Let that sink in.Joan Donovan is the founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute and assistant professor of journalism at Boston University More

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      How a second Trump term could further enrich Elon Musk: ‘There will be some quid pro quo’

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      Donald Trump owes his decisive 2024 presidential victory in no small part to the enthusiastic support of the world’s richest man. In the months leading up to the election, Elon Musk put his full weight behind the Maga movement, advocated for Trump on major podcasts and used his influence over X to shape political discourse. Musk’s America Pac injected nearly $120m into the former president’s campaign.Now, Trump is looking to return the favor. Speaking with reporters last month, he said he would appoint Musk as “secretary of cost-cutting”. Musk, for his part, has joked he would be interested in serving as head of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (Doge) with a stated goal of reducing government spending by $2tn. Practically speaking, experts say those cost cuts could result in deregulation and policy changes that would directly impact Musk’s universe of companies, particularly Tesla, SpaceX, X and Neuralink.Trump administration officials, eager to maintain Musk’s support, may similarly loosen rules and reassign federal government officials to benefit Musk’s interests. It’s an explicit, openly transactional relationship unlike any seen in recent US political memory, experts said.“We’ve seen lobbying efforts, we’ve seen Super Pacs, but this is a different level we’ve never seen before,” said Gita Johar, a professor at Columbia Business School. “There will be some quid pro quo where he [Musk] will benefit.”Pausing for a moment, Johar added: “‘Conflict of interest’ seems rather quaint.”Trump: bad for electric vehicles, good for ElonTesla is already reaping the benefits of a second Trump administration. On Wednesday, just hours after the Associated Press official called the race in favor of Trump, the car company’s stock shot up 13% to a 52-week high. By the end of the week, Tesla reached $1tn in market capitalization, its highest valuation in two years. Musk’s own fortune shot up $26bn with the stock.That might seem odd considering the former president’s vocal disdain for electric vehicles. In recent years, the president-elect has referred to efforts to promote environmentally friendly cars as a “Green New Scam” and claimed EVs simply “don’t work.” He has also pledged he would end Joe Biden’s “electric vehicle mandate” on his first day in office. Biden has implemented tax credits and emissions standards that favor electric vehicles.But Trump’s hardline rhetoric against EVs started to soften almost immediately after Musk pledged his support for the candidate. Trump himself has been explicit about the reason for his shifting outlook.“I’m for electric cars,” Trump said during a campaign event in August. “I have to be, because Elon endorsed me very strongly.”Still, experts agreed a Trump administration will likely roll back tax credits for consumers looking to buy new electric vehicles. That would hurt newer EV startups and legacy carmakers that are still trying to bring down the costs of manufacturing their vehicles. By contrast, eliminating those credits may be a boon to Tesla since the company has already made extensive use of those credits to capture a commanding lead in the EV market in the US.View image in fullscreen“Tesla has the scale and scope that is unmatched,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a recent note to investors. “This dynamic could give Musk and Tesla a clear competitive advantage in a non-EV subsidy environment.” For the rest of the electric vehicle industry, though, Trump presidency would be “an overall negative”, Ives wrote.Tesla will also find itself caught in the middle of Trump’s much-vaunted but still vague tariff proposals. Though auto tariffs could help insulate Tesla from cheap, competitive Chinese electric vehicles entering US markets from the likes of BYD, stiff import taxes would simultaneously make it much more expensive to manufacture new cars. Tesla’s supply chain is highly dependent on goods and materials from China. Steel tariffs would likely drive up the cost to produce the company’s Cybertruck, while tariffs impacting rare earth metals and minerals sourced from China would also drive up costs of semiconductors crucial to powering the fleet’s cameras and sensors.“If there is a general tariff, the price of those will skyrocket,” George Mason University Mercatus Center research fellow Matt Mittelsteadt said in an interview. “You can’t re-shore what you can’t make.” Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.Clearing a road for Musk’s autonomous vehiclesExperts say Musk’s role in the Trump administration could help chart the path for Tesla’s autonomous vehicle rollout. The company is currently being investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) over the role its Autopilot and “full-self driving” features may have played in a spate of accidents, including more than two dozen fatal ones. A Trump administration favorable toward Musk’s business interest could wind down those investigations.“The specific worry with Musk and NHTSA is that the Trump administration might influence the decisions that civil servants are making to benefit the business interests of Tesla,” Cardozo School of Law professor and tech regulation expert Matthew Wansley said.Musk has also explicitly said he would try to leverage his influence in a Trump administration to streamline regulations around fully autonomous “driverless” vehicles like those operated by Waymo and Cruise. Though Tesla vehicles aren’t currently capable of the same level of autonomy, Musk recently revealed the concept for a more advanced “Cybercab” robotaxi he says will operate without a steering wheel.Current safety regulation for this level of autonomous vehicles varies by state and generally require years of testing with humans behind the wheel. Musk advocated for a “federal approval process” that would preempt those strict state rules during a third-quarter Tesla earnings call. If that weaker federal process were to be approved, Tesla may have a shorter climb to catch up with more advanced competitors.SpaceX could win lucrative government contracts for a Starlink rollout and a Mars missionFew of Musk’s endeavors have benefited as directly from government partnerships in recent years as SpaceX. The private space company secured a $3bn federal contract in 2021. It is currently competing with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin for a series of contracts with the US Space Force worth some $5.6bn. Musk has already asked Trump to appoint SpaceX employees to top government positions, according to the New York Times.Experts agreed Musk’s relationship with Trump would strengthen its position as a top contender for space contracts. Mittelsteadt says recent Republican opposition to the Biden administration’s beleaguered rural $42.45bn broadband initiative could also open up a new path for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service. A GOP-led Federal Communications Commission, Mittelsteadt argued, could decide to pay SpaceX to expand Starlink access nationwide. Trump lauded Starlink’s role in providing internet access to hurricane survivors during a speech on election night.“The ceiling for what he could possibly get out of government contracts could be raising,” Mittelsteadt said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump and Musk also appear united in their interest in sending a rocket to Mars. The president-elect has repeatedly praised Musk’s “beautiful, shiny white” rockets on the campaign trail and has said he wants to land a rocket on the red planet before the end of his next term.“We will land an American astronaut on Mars,” Trump said during an October rally.Musk, meanwhile, has repeatedly emphasized his dream of colonizing Mars and creating an interplanetary human species. Equally as often, he has criticized the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for bureaucratic “superfluous delays.” A favorable Trump administration could feel motivated to soften those rules and guidelines, experts said. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.Trump could reduce scrutiny on Neuralink and XTelsa and SpaceX aren’t the only Musk-owned properties that stand to thrive during a second Trump term. Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company, has drawn scrutiny from the US Food and Drug Administration over alleged issues related to record-keeping and quality controls for its animal testing. A more favorable FDA under the Trump administration could help wind down those inquiries and provide a clearer runway for the company’s future experiments. Neuralink did not respond to a request for comment.X, which Musk acquired in 2020 for $44bn, could likewise benefit during a Trump term. The platform served as an important, invaluable resource for spreading pro-Trump rhetoric during the 2024 presidential campaign. Johar, whose recent research dives into X’s rise, said its utility to Trump makes it unlikely to draw regulators’ ire under him.“I don’t see any guardrails going up in terms of verifying the truth of information that’s already gone by the wayside since X was taken over,” said Johar.‘Conflict of interest seem rather quaint’The scope of Musk’s influence in the Trump administration and US politics more broadly is just beginning. The billionaire said last week in a conversation livestreamed on X that he will continue pouring money into America PAC, his organization founded this summer to support Trump’s bid for president, and has plans to “weigh in heavily” on future elections like the 2026 midterms.“It’s impossible to imagine how much influence Elon Musk could have in this administration because there’s no precedent,” University of California Berkeley professor Dan Schnur said. “He could have spent over a billion dollars, and it would’ve still been an incredibly savvy investment for him.”Experts speaking to the Guardian unanimously agreed Musk’s potential efforts to influence policies that could directly impact his business would constitute a clear conflict of interest. Whether or not the billionaire faces substantive penalties, however, remains to be seen. Musk and the allied Trump administration could face a barrage of lawsuits alleging misconduct, but litigation alone may not prevent Musk from achieving his preferred policy agenda, experts predicted.“There are all sorts of potential conflicts of interest. The question is whether that bothers Trump or not,” Schnur said. “It’s a reasonable bet to assume that it does not.”Musk has said he would attempt to trim $2tn in government spending if appointed to the cost-cutting position in the Trump White House. Though he hasn’t fully outlined how he would achieve such a goal, the billionaire has suggested much of that belt-tightening could come from eliminating what he sees as redundant government workers and reducing overly burdensome regulations. But Mittelstead says Musk will likely face an uphill battle if tries to apply a “move fast and break things” attitude toward US government positions.“The type of cost-cutting, slash-and-burn approach that he brought to Twitter is not possible in the public sector,” Mittelstead said.It’s also an open question as to whether or not Musk and Trump’s newfound relationship can withstand the weight of two notoriously volatile personalities. Musk made headlines in 2017 when he stepped down from a pair of Trump advisory councils after disagreeing with the then-president decision to exit the Paris Climate Accords. Trump, for his part, has previously referred to Musk as a “bullshit artist”.“They’ve appeared to have developed a very strong personal rapport,” Schnur said. “But they’re also two of the most volatile personalities on the set and earth.” More

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

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      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

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      How Elon Musk became Donald Trump’s shadow vice-president

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      As Donald Trump watched election results roll in from a party at his Mar-a-Lago compound, Elon Musk sat arm’s length away, basking in the impending victory he had helped secure. In less than five months, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO had gone from not endorsing a candidate to becoming a fixture of the president-elect’s inner circle.“The future is gonna be so 🔥 🇺🇸🇺🇸,” Musk posted to his social media platform, X, just after midnight, along with a photo of himself leaning over to talk with Trump at the Mar-a-Lago dinner.Musk’s place at the head table was the result of months of political efforts by the world’s richest man, and an injection of at least $130m of his own money. Musk campaigned for Trump both online and offline, funded advertising and get-out-the-vote operations for a campaign at a severe financial disadvantage to its opponent. He even temporarily decamped from his home in Texas to the swing state of Pennsylvania, where he appeared at town hall events and held a $1m daily giveaway for voters.Musk wasn’t the only billionaire rooting for Trump. But unlike some of his peers, who preferred operating in the shadows, shielded by Super Pacs and meetings behind closed doors, he became Trump’s most visible surrogate. As so often with his endeavors, Musk was all in. And now, gambling on becoming one of Trump’s most vocal and deep-pocketed supporters has won Musk direct influence and access to the nation’s highest office, making him not only the world’s richest man but also one of its most politically powerful.Musk’s exact role in the coming administration is still unclear. Trump has previously said that the CEO would lead a full audit of the federal government, and make drastic reforms as “secretary of cost-cutting”. Any such position would create immense conflicts of interest, as Musk’s companies hold billions in contracts with the government and are also facing investigations from federal agencies. Under Trump, who has long opposed regulators and ignored ethical conflicts, that may not matter. Musk’s fortune soared by $26bn just two days after the election.Beyond any potential formal government role, Musk has also ingratiated himself as a close ally of the president-elect – who adopted some of Musk’s policy suggestions during the campaign and praised him as a “super genius” during his victory speech. He reportedly joined Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on Wednesday, signaling broad influence.That same day, Trump’s granddaughter posted a family photo of “the whole squad” taken at the previous evening’s watch party. Standing among three generations of smiling family members, just in front of Eric Trump and Jared Kushner, was Musk.Musk emerges as Trump’s most prominent backerMusk’s ascent to a key player in Trump’s campaign happened rapidly. Back in March, the CEO was adamant he would not endorse a candidate for president. As late as May, he said he was still weighing his options. Then, in July, on the same day that Trump was injured in a failed assassination attempt, he told the world he had changed his mind. He was all in immediately and called on others in the tech industry to throw their weight behind the Republican party. “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” Musk posted alongside footage of Trump throwing his fist in the air after the shooting.Musk’s vow of support was in keeping with his increasingly public embrace of rightwing leaders, and his promotion of far-right views on issues like immigration. In recent years, the billionaire had become convinced of the rightwing conspiracy theory that Democrats were planning to bring in millions of undocumented immigrants to tilt elections in their favor, with the New York Times reporting that he told a group of conservative billionaires in the spring of this year that if Biden won, it would be the end of American democracy. He has since repeated the claim publicly, warning of “the last election” if Trump lost.What would quickly become clear following Musk’s endorsement was that he was planning to do far more than just provide words of support. Behind the scenes, Musk had already begun offering his input into the campaign with a phone call to Trump advising him to select JD Vance as his running mate. When Musk’s preferred choice was confirmed – and the nomination drew criticism over Vance’s fervent anti-abortion stance and ties to extreme Christian nationalists – Musk immediately posted that the ticket “resounds with victory”.Musk would soon go even further, becoming one of Trump’s largest financial backers and ardent cheerleaders..On the campaign trailAfter announcing his endorsement in July, Musk immediately began contributing millions of dollars to the pro-Trump America Pac – which was set up the month prior and functioned as Musk’s personal political organization and war chest for the Trump campaign. Musk donated $15m in July and exponentially increased his funding each month, ultimately contributing more than $118m by election day.Over the next several months, Musk took on the role of a secondary running mate, accompanying Trump at speeches, giving policy ideas and handling campaign strategy.America Pac largely took over the Trump campaign’s ground game in key swing states, hiring hundreds of people across the country to canvass voters. The organization knocked on about 11m doors, according to the New York Times, while also spending millions on digital advertisements and mailers targeting voters.The operations faced numerous allegations of employee mistreatment and labor law violations. In one case first reported by Wired, a subcontractor for Musk’s America Pac allegedly flew in paid door-knockers who had no idea they would be canvassing for Trump and piled them into the back of a rented U-Haul without seatbelts or rear seating. Other canvassers allegedly falsely claimed to have visited homes in Nevada and Arizona, with a Guardian review of leaked data finding that nearly a quarter of door-knocks were flagged as fraudulent on the canvassing app.View image in fullscreenOutside of his financial contributions, Musk also made in-person appearances to support Trump. He appeared on stage in a black Maga hat at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, captured jumping for joy in what has become one of the enduring images of the campaign. He opened for Trump at the Madison Square Garden rally that was maligned for its racist and extremist rhetoric.As the campaign neared its end, Musk’s America Pac also began directly giving money to prospective voters, doling out $1m a day to a selected voter who signed a petition linked to the Pac. At one giveaway in Pittsburgh, he appeared on stage in front of a giant American flag to hand an oversized check to a woman and tell the crowd that he loved them.Musk’s giveaway, which Philadelphia’s district attorney sued to block, has now become the subject of multiple lawsuits and disputes about whether it was really a lottery at all. Lawyers for Musk claimed in a Pennsylvania court hearing earlier this week that the winners were not random but chosen by the organization, an admission that has resulted in a proposed class-action suit from voters who claimed they were falsely led to believe they had a chance at the cash prize.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn TwitterWhile some of Musk’s ground operations and electioneering ran into legal challenges, on his own platform, he had carte blanche to promote Trump however he wanted.Viewed purely in financial terms, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is an obvious failure. Mainstream advertisers have fled the platform en masse as it has further entrenched itself as a haven for far-right influencers, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists. Its algorithm has shifted to promote viral videos, as well as bots spreading pornography, over fact-based news outlets and reliable sources of information. Musk and his investment partners, which include the Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, have lost billions in value, according to a Washington Post analysis, and the company is now worth less than half of its purchase price.What Musk gained from his purchase, however, is control over one of the world’s most influential communications platforms and the ability to make himself its loudest voice there. Musk has tweaked the platform’s algorithm to ensure that his posts reach its users regardless of whether they are among his more than 200 million followers. During the campaign, he turned his account, and by extension the entire platform, into a relentless pro-Trump megaphone.In August, Musk hosted a two-hour audio interview with Trump on X in which the men discussed anti-immigration policies and Musk called Trump the “path to prosperity”. While the interview provided little that hadn’t been said before, it was a sign of how much had changed since Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter in 2021. Not only was Trump back, he was being feted as the future of the country by the head of the platform.Musk’s promotion of Trump, as well as his attacks on Democrats, media and Kamala Harris, became a dominant part of the platform’s user experience. He tweeted over 145 times in a single 24-hour period on the day following his Trump interview, according to a Guardian analysis. His feed in the lead-up to the vote was a near-constant string of invective and misinformation, along with retweets of far-right influencers promoting conspiracy theories about undocumented immigrants committing voter fraud.View image in fullscreenMusk’s influence on the Trump campaign extended beyond policy into the visual representation of the candidate as well. His release of an AI image generator named Grok in August heavily influenced the visuals of the campaign. Lacking the safety guardrails of competitors such as ChatGPT, Grok could be used to create images of public figures and political leaders. Almost immediately, social media platforms became rife with AI images of Trump, Harris and other celebrities – often featuring misogynistic imagery like Harris pregnant with Trump’s baby. Trump reposted AI images from rightwing influencers falsely showing Taylor Swift supporting his campaign, while Musk posted an image depicting Harris as a communist.Along with his own posts, Musk’s America Pac also set up a community on X dedicated to “election integrity”. The community allowed users to share any evidence they found of voter fraud, but without any moderation, it effectively and immediately became a clearing house for false or unverified claims including a fake video of Haitians illegally voting for Harris.While Musk has frequently described himself as a “free speech absolutist”, he also oversaw the suppression of information that would have potentially harmed the Trump campaign. When an independent reporter published a dossier of background research on Vance that was obtained through an alleged Iranian cyber-attack on the Trump campaign, Musk’s X blocked all links to the article and suspended the reporter from that platform.Musk at the White HouseMusk’s bet on Trump has already made him over $26bn richer, as Tesla’s share price surged following the Republican election victory. If Musk remains in Trump’s good graces – not a given for two men with a history of imploding business relationships – he may stand to benefit even further through deregulation policies and the gutting of federal agencies tasked with overseeing his companies.Musk’s profile picture on X now features him in a black Maga hat, with a new bio that declares “the people voted for major government reform”.Musk’s companies such as SpaceX and Starlink, which are already government contractors deeply intertwined with various agencies, may also find even deeper influence. Musk has requested that Trump hire employees from SpaceX to serve in top government roles including at the Department of Defense, according to the New York Times.Trump as of now appears amenable to Musk’s business interests and requests. During his victory speech, he repeatedly praised Musk, saying that he loved him and touting his ability to do what government agencies could not.“A star is born. Elon, he’s an amazing guy,” Trump said on Wednesday.As it became clear late into election night that Trump would win a decisive victory, Musk shared a meme of himself holding a large porcelain sink while standing in the Oval Office. The image was a callback to when he bought Twitter and physically carried a sink into headquarters in order to make a pun, shortly before laying off most of the staff and turning the platform into a largely unregulated space where extremism thrives.“Let that sink in,” Musk posted. More

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      Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and other business leaders congratulate Trump

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      Business leaders were swift to offer their congratulations to Donald Trump on his election victory, less than four years after they criticized him for his role in the January 6 insurrection.Some of tech’s business leaders, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook all publicly congratulated Trump for his win.“Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Bezos said in a statement. “No nation has bigger opportunities.”“Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country,” Zuckerberg wrote on Threads. “Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”“Congratulations President Trump on your victory! We look forward to engaging with you and your administration,” Cook wrote on Twitter/X.The influential Business Roundtable, a powerful lobbying group with more than 200 members, who are the chief executives of companies such as JPMorgan, Walmart, Google and Pepsi, said in a statement: “Business Roundtable congratulates President-elect Donald Trump on his election as the 47th President of the United States.”“We look forward to working with the incoming Trump Administration and all federal and state policymakers,” the group said.Billionaire Mark Cuban, who endorsed Kamala Harris, was one of the first to congratulate Trump just after 1am ET.“Congrats @realDonaldTrump. You won fair and square,” Cuban wrote. “Congrats to @elonmusk as well.”Elon Musk, Trump’s highest-profile business backer, celebrated with a post on X declaring victory for himself. “It is morning in America again,” he wrote. Trump has floated giving Musk an influential role in his administration.The reaction presents a stark contrast to how the leaders responded to Trump after the 2020 election. Cook had called the insurrection “a shameful chapter in our nation’s history”, while Zuckerberg said: “I believe the former president should be responsible for his words.”Bezos, meanwhile, had congratulated Joe Biden for his victory four years ago with a post. “Unity, empathy and decency are not characteristics of a bygone era,” he said on Instagram, posting a picture of Biden and Kamala Harris.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt’s something of an about-face that was seen leading up to the election. Trump had started to brag that executives such as Google’s Sundar Pichai and Zuckerberg were calling him, seemingly trying to rebuild relationships that had been strained during Biden’s presidency.Bezos has had a particularly fraught relationship with Trump. But in October the Bezos-owned Washington Post chose not to endorse any candidate in the US presidential election. The Post had planned to endorse the vice-president.While coalitions of former executives had endorsed Harris, and said that many CEOs were probably going to vote in support of her, the business community appears poised to transition to a second Trump term. By Wednesday afternoon, US stock markets were soaring on news of Trump’s victory.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Can democracy survive now the world’s richest man has it in his sights? | George Monbiot

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      This is what happens when successive US governments fail to tackle inequality. While millions of people live in poverty, a handful grow unimaginably rich. Wealth begets wealth, and they acquire political power to match. It was inevitable that one of them – now the richest man on Earth – would launch what looks like a bid for world domination.A vote for Donald Trump next week is a vote for Elon Musk. Just as Trump is using Musk, Musk could be using Trump as a springboard to perhaps even greater power than the US president can wield. Musk’s secret conversations with Vladimir Putin, reported by the Wall Street Journal last week, and his contacts with other extremist world leaders, suggest a pattern of power-seeking that could be even more alarming than the prospect of a second Trump presidency.Trump, if he wins, will do to the nation what Musk did to Twitter: the US will be e-Muskulated. What this means is that those with the power to swarm, harass and crush people who do not share their noxious ideology will be unleashed.Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist”. But his absolutism seems to extend only to his allies. Since he bought Twitter and renamed it X, the platform has complied with 83% of requests by governments for the censorship or surveillance of accounts. When the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, demanded the censorship of his opponents before the last general election, the platform obliged. When Indian government officials asked it to remove a hostile BBC documentary, X did as they asked, and later deleted the accounts of many critics of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.Last month, X blocked links to a dossier about Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and suspended the account of the journalist who revealed it. Musk has sued organisations that criticise him. Because the most vicious and antisocial people – racists, antisemites, misogynists, homophobes, even outright Nazis – have been reinstated and often boosted, millions of other users have been driven from the platform, their own free speech diminished. Musk’s own posts are reportedly amplified a thousandfold by a boutique algorithm. Free speech absolutism? My left foot.Now he has bent his immense wealth, power and blatant double standards to a frantic effort to get Trump elected. Some of his tactics – cash rewards and cash prizes – look to me like attempts to buy votes and interfere in an election. His lawyers were able to prevent him having to attend court this week for a hearing challenging these tactics: another privilege of wealth. He has used his X account to spread rampant misinformation on Trump’s behalf, giving him many millions of dollars’ worth of advertising. He has poured $118m into his pro-Trump super Pac (political action committee).What would the world’s richest man gain from the e-Muskulation of US – and perhaps global – politics? He would gain what capital has sought since workers acquired the vote: the truncation of democracy. Democracy is the problem capital keeps trying to solve. Why? Because it ensures that workers have rights and fair wages; that the living world has some (though never enough) protections; that we cannot be ripped off, poisoned and robbed without restraint.Capitalism has used two powerful tools to try to solve its problem: fascism and neoliberalism. But now, though drawing on both those ideologies, it reverts to an older and cruder mode: oligarchy. Why, the billionaires might wonder, should they rely on intermediaries to wield political power? After all, in every other sphere, the world bows to them, not to their concierges. This, I think, is where Musk and some of his fellow tech authoritarians have been heading.A Trump victory would allow Musk to escape the regulators with which he is often in conflict. In fact, if he takes up Trump’s offer of running a government efficiency commission, Musk becomes his own regulator, able to erase the rules that make the difference between a good society and barbarism.But Trump’s election might also permit even greater opportunities. Musk controls key strategic and military assets, such as SpaceX satellite launchers and the Starlink internet system. As Ukraine discovered to its cost last year, he can switch them off at whim. The kind of decision-making powerful states deploy has been privatised. The Kremlin is reported to have asked him to withhold Starlink access from Taiwan, as a favour to the Chinese government. Terrestrial broadband operators claim that Starlink could interfere with and degrade their own systems. Starlink has refuted this. It is not hard to see how his power could grow to the point at which governments feel obliged to do as he demands.He might not look the part. Villains bent on world domination are meant to be suave, laconic, self-possessed. Musk dresses like an attention-hungry teenager and behaves accordingly. Yet he has been equipped with the means to multiply his power beyond any that a plutocrat has wielded in the democratic era.For decades now, the centrist pact with capital has worked as follows: we might seek half-heartedly to improve the lives of people at the bottom, but we will do almost nothing to hold down those at the top. As a short-term tactic it worked: Rupert Murdoch and other members of the plutocrats’ trade union struck an uneasy truce with Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and their ilk. But the long-term result is that the ultra-rich became so wealthy that they could present a direct threat to sovereign nations, even to the most powerful nation of all. Some of us have spent decades warning that this was the likely outcome: appeasement makes your opponents more powerful. But our governments claimed they were simply being “pragmatic”: it didn’t matter how rich some people became, as long as the lot of the poor improved.Decades of studies, some of which were summarised 15 years ago in The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, show what nonsense this is. A highly unequal society, whatever its absolute levels of wealth and poverty, is devastating for social outcomes, for wellbeing, cohesion and democracy. But “pragmatism” prevailed, and turned out not to be pragmatic at all. The slippage from democracy to oligarchy should surprise no one.So now we face a generalised e-Muskulation: of public life, of trust, of kindness, of mutual aid, of a world in which the poor could aspire to something better, and in which all of us could aspire to a healthy living planet. Governments that have not yet fully succumbed must do what should have been done long ago: make the poor richer, and the very rich poorer.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More

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      Elon Musk’s ‘election integrity community’ on X is full of baseless claims

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      While Elon Musk faces his own election integrity questions offline, the X owner has deputized his followers to spot and report any “potential instances of voter fraud and irregularities”. The community he spawned is rife with unfounded claims passed off as evidence of voter fraud.Musk opted not to show up to a required court appearance Thursday in Philadelphia to respond to a lawsuit challenging his political action committee’s daily $1m voter giveaway. Meanwhile, online, he has started a dedicated community space on X, formerly Twitter, where he’s asked users to share any issues they see while voting. Users posting on the self-contained feed, the “election integrity community”, quickly began pointing out what they deemed as evidence of fraud and election interference.Tweets showing everything from ballots that arrived ripped, an ABC news system test, a postal worker doing his job and dropping off mail-in ballots were all presented as evidence that the upcoming presidential election had been compromised. Some users posted videos of individuals they deemed suspicious, despite providing little or no proof of suspicious activity and asked others in the community to help identify them.Among the tweets are attempts at doxxing and identifying people who users falsely accuse of ballot box stuffing or preventing Trump supporters from voting. In one case, a post with 14,000 shares and 31,000 likes includes a video of a postal worker bringing ballots into a polling location in Northampton county, Pennsylvania.The same video had been shared throughout X and other forums and retweeted by rightwing influencers like Alex Jones. The user asks for help identifying the man. “He says he’s with the post office but idk if I buy that,” the post reads. “He wouldn’t talk to us and was acting very suspect.” The man in question was the acting postmaster and a 25-year-veteran of the US Postal Service, the Northampton county executive Lamont McClure confirmed to NBC News. McClure told NBC News that the postal worker was already being harassed over the video.Experts say the community, which has more than 50,000 members, follows the same playbook used in feverish online forums after the 2020 election to fuel claims that votes were stolen. In 2020, it was the “Stop the Steal” Facebook group, Telegram groups and message boards on alt-right social media firm Parler.These groups amassed hundreds of thousands of followers who perpetuated the baseless claim that the election was being stolen from Donald Trump. Much of the anecdotal and often unfounded stories shared in these groups by individuals were leveraged by rightwing influencers and other figures to create the narrative that the election was compromised, according to a report by the Election Integrity Partnership.“These are real rumors by real people that are being picked up and used by a propaganda machine that really wants to get that view out there,” said Renee DiResta, an associate professor at Georgetown University and former research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory. “That’s what happened in 2020. [It was the same] process of ‘stop the steal.’ The slogan came from the top but it was ordinary people who provided the ‘evidence’ to back up the idea that the election was stolen.”Before anyone can determine whether the claims are true or false, users seize on the posts and assume the often unsuspecting person being shown are guilty or doing something bad, said DiResta. “Unfortunately the people who bear the costs are the random people whose photographs they take.”

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      The “election integrity community” provides another glimpse into the echo chamber of individuals across the country who believe the election will be or has already been rigged against Trump. Though the space is separate from the normal X feed, Musk has also shared some of the concerns posted in the community on his own page.Among the narratives being pushed in the community is one that has become a pet conspiracy theory of Musk’s. The SpaceX CEO has loudly and often made the false claim that the Biden administration was “importing voters” in the form of “unvetted illegal immigrants”. In the last few days, a Musk-funded super Pac has been pushing a fake pro-Kamala Harris initiative called Project 2028. The initiative has posted fake pro-Harris ads and sent texts to voters that include claims that Harris will be opening the country’s borders and is pushing for undocumented immigrants to be able to vote. Non-citizens are not allowed to vote in the US, and there is no available evidence they are voting in droves as claimed. Users in the community are sharing videos they say provides evidence that Democrats are “bussing” undocumented immigrants to cast votes in their favor. More

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      Elon Musk skips hearing as $1m election giveaway case moves to federal court

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      Elon Musk failed to show up to a required hearing in a Philadelphia case challenging his $1m-a-day sweepstakes. His absence would have risked contempt of court had the case continued in Pennsylvania court, but it was moved to federal court in response to a motion filed by Musk’s attorneys, who did attend the hearing. No hearings were immediately scheduled in the federal case.Judge Angelo Foglietta agreed that Musk, as a named defendant in the lawsuit filed by the district attorney, Larry Krasner, should have attended the hearing in person, but he declined to immediately sanction the tech mogul. Musk’s attorney said his client could not “materialize” in the courtroom with notice only given the night before.Krasner’s team challenged the notion that the founder of SpaceX could not make it to Philadelphia, prompting a quick retort from the judge.“Counsel, he’s not going to get in a rocket ship and land on the building,” Foglietta replied.On Wednesday, the judge had ordered all parties to attend the Thursday morning hearing, including Musk. Musk’s attorneys had filed a motion to shift the suit from Pennsylvania state court to federal court in a filing late that day, which was granted shortly after Musk did not appear.Lawyers for the Philadelphia district attorney’s office requested the case be returned to state court, calling the move to the higher court a “cowardly” delay tactic meant to “run the clock until election day”. The federal judge assigned to the case ordered Musk’s attorneys to respond by Friday morning. Musk’s counsel had argued that state court was not the proper venue and that the Philadelphia district attorney was engaging in thinly veiled electioneering.“Rather, although disguised as state law claims, the complaint’s focus is to prevent defendants’ purported ‘interference’ with the forthcoming federal presidential election by any means,” the Tesla CEO’s attorneys wrote.In the original suit, Krasner argued that Musk’s petition and associated contest were “indisputably violating” specific Pennsylvania laws against illegal lotteries. Musk’s attorneys said he was engaging in legally protected political speech and spending.John Summers, an attorney for the DA’s office, told the judge on Thursday that Musk’s Pac had “brazenly” continued the sweepstakes despite the lawsuit, awarding about 13 checks of $1m since the contest began, including one the day of the hearing.“They’re doing things in the dark. We don’t know the rules being followed. We don’t know how they’re supposedly picking people at random,” Summers said. “It’s an outrage.”The cash giveaways come from Musk’s political organization, which aims to boost Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the vital swing state, which is seen as a key to victory by both Trump and his opponent, Kamala Harris.Krasner, a Democrat, filed suit on Monday to stop the America Pac sweepstakes, which is set to run through election day and is open to registered voters in swing states who sign a petition supporting the constitution. Musk has been tweeting photographs of the winners holding novelty checks.Krasner has said he could still consider criminal charges, saying he is tasked with protecting the public from both illegal lotteries and “interference with the integrity of elections”.Election law experts have raised questions about whether Musk’s drawing violates a federal law barring someone from paying others to vote. Musk has cast the money as both a prize as well as earnings for work as a spokesperson for the group. More