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      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

      Elon Musk is getting out of control. Here is how to to rein him in | Robert Reich

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      Elon Musk is rapidly transforming his enormous wealth – he’s the richest person in the world – into a huge source of unaccountable political power that’s now backing Trump and other authoritarians around the world.Musk owns X, formerly known as Twitter. He publicly endorsed Donald Trump last month. Before that, Musk helped form a pro-Trump super political action committee. Meanwhile, the former US president has revived his presence on the X platform.Musk just hired a Republican operative with expertise in field organizing to help with get-out-the-vote efforts on behalf of Trump.Trump and Musk have both floated the idea of governing together if Trump wins a second term. “I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission,” Musk said in a conversation with Trump earlier this month streamed on X. “And I’d be happy to help out on such a commission.”Musk reposted a faked version of Kamala Harris’s first campaign video with an altered voice track sounding like Harris and saying she doesn’t “know the first thing about running the country” and is the “ultimate diversity hire”. Musk tagged the video “amazing”. It’s got hundreds of millions of views, so far.The Michigan secretary of state has accused the Musk-supported America Pac of tricking people into sharing personal data. Although the Pac’s website promises to help users register to vote, it allegedly asks users in battleground states to give their names and phone numbers without directing them to a voter registration site – and then uses that information to send them anti-Harris and pro-Trump ads.According to a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk himself has posted 50 false election claims on X so far this year. They’ve got a total of 1.2bn views. None of them had a “community note” from X’s supposed fact-checking system.Evidence is mounting that Russia and other foreign agents are using X to disrupt this year’s presidential race, presumably in favor of Trump. Musk has done little to stop them.Meanwhile, Musk is supporting rightwing causes around the world.In the UK, far-right thugs burned, looted and terrorized minority communities as Musk’s X spread misinformation about a deadly attack on schoolgirls. Musk not only allowed instigators of this hate to spread these lies, but he retweeted and supported them.At least eight times in the past 10 months, Musk has prophesied a future civil war related to immigration. When anti-immigration street riots occurred across Britain, he wrote: “civil war is inevitable.”The European Union commissioner Thierry Breton sent Musk an open letter reminding him of EU laws against amplifying harmful content “that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or certain instances of disinformation” and warning that the EU “will be extremely vigilant” about protecting “EU citizens from serious harm”.Musk’s response was a meme that said: “TAKE A BIG STEP BACK AND LITERALLY, F*CK YOUR OWN FACE!”Elon Musk calls himself a “free speech absolutist” but has accepted over 80% of censorship requests from authoritarian governments. Two days before the Turkish elections, he blocked accounts critical of the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.And his friendly relations with authoritarians often seem to coincide with beneficial treatment of his businesses; shortly after Musk suggested handing Taiwan over to the Chinese government, Tesla got a tax break from the Chinese government.He may be the richest man in the world. He may own one of the world’s most influential social media platforms. But that doesn’t mean we’re powerless to stop him.Here are six ways to rein in Musk:1. Boycott Tesla.Consumers shouldn’t be making him even richer and able to do even more harm. A Tesla boycott may have already begun. A recent poll said one-third of Britons are less likely to buy a Tesla because of Musk’s recent behavior.2. Advertisers should boycott X.A coalition of major advertisers has organized such a boycott. Musk is suing them under antitrust law. “We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war,” he wrote on X, referring to advertisers who criticize him and X.3. Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.Global regulators may be on the way to doing this, as evidenced by the 24 August arrest in France of Pavel Durov, who founded the online communications tool Telegram, which French authorities have found complicit in hate crimes and disinformation. Like Musk, Durov has styled himself as a free speech absolutist.4. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission should demand that Musk take down lies that are likely to endanger individuals – and if he does not, sue him under Section Five of the FTC Act.Musk’s free-speech rights under the first amendment don’t take precedence over the public interest. Two months ago, the US supreme court said federal agencies may pressure social media platforms to take down misinformation – a technical win for the public good (technical because the court based its ruling on the plaintiff’s lack of standing to sue).5. The US government – and we taxpayers – have additional power over Musk, if we’re willing to use it. The US should terminate its contracts with him, starting with Musk’s SpaceX.In 2021, the United States entered into a $1.8bn classified contract with SpaceX that includes blasting off classified and military satellites, according to the Wall Street Journal. The funds are now an important part of SpaceX’s revenue.The Pentagon has also contracted with SpaceX’s Starlink broadband service to pay for internet links, despite Musk’s refusal in September 2022 to allow Ukraine to use Starlink to launch an attack on Russian forces in Crimea.Last August, the Pentagon gave SpaceX’s Starshield unit $70m to provide communications services to dozens of Pentagon partners.Meanwhile, SpaceX is cornering the rocket launch market. Its rockets were responsible for two-thirds of flights from US launch sites in 2022 and handled 88% in the first six months of this year.In deciding upon which private-sector entities to contract with, the US government is supposed to consider the contractor’s reliability. Musk’s mercurial, impulsive temperament makes him and the companies he heads unreliable. The government is also supposed to consider whether it is contributing to a monopoly. Musk’s SpaceX is fast becoming one.Why is the US government allowing Musk’s satellites and rocket launchers to become crucial to the nation’s security when he’s shown utter disregard for the public interest? Why give Musk more economic power when he repeatedly abuses it and demonstrates contempt for the public good?There is no good reason. American taxpayers must stop subsidizing Elon Musk.6. Make sure Musk’s favorite candidate for president is not elected.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      in US Politics

      How did Donald Trump end up posting Taylor Swift deepfakes?

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      When Donald Trump shared a slew of AI-generated images this week that falsely depicted Taylor Swift and her fans endorsing his campaign for president, the former US president was amplifying the work of a murky non-profit with aspirations to bankroll rightwing media influencers and a history of spreading misinformation.Several of the images Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, which showed digitally rendered young women in “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts, were the products of the John Milton Freedom Foundation. Launched last year, the Texas-based non-profit organization frames itself as a press freedom group with the goal of “empowering independent journalists” and “fortifying the bedrock of democracy”.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenThe group’s day-to-day operations appear to revolve around sharing engagement bait on X and seeking millions from donors for a “fellowship program” chaired by a high school sophomore that would award $100,000 to Twitter personalities such as Glenn Greenwald, Andy Ngo and Lara Logan, according to a review of the group’s tax records, investor documents and social media output. The John Milton Freedom Foundation did not return request for comment to a set of questions about its operations and fellowship program.After months of retweeting conservative media influencers and echoing Elon Musk’s claims that freedom of speech is under attack from leftwing forces, one of the organization’s messages found its way to Trump and then his millions of supporters.Disinformation researchers have long warned that generative AI has the ability to lower the bar for creating misleading content and threaten information around elections. After Musk’s xAI company released its largely unregulated Grok image generator last week, there has been a surge of AI content that has included depictions of Trump, Kamala Harris and other political figures. The Milton Freedom Foundation is one of many small groups flooding social media with so-called AI slop.A niche non-profit’s AI slop makes its way to TrumpDuring the spike in AI images on X, the conservative @amuse account posted the images of AI-generated Swift fans to more than 300,000 followers. On the text of the post, which was labeled “satire”, was a watermark that stated it was “sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Foundation”. Trump posted a screenshot of @amuse’s tweet on Truth Social.The @amuse account has considerable reach itself, with about 390,000 followers on X and dozens of daily posts. Running @amuse appears to be Alexander Muse, listed as a consultant in the investor prospectus of the Milton Foundation, who also writes a rightwing commentary Substack that includes posts exploring election conspiracy theories. The @amuse account has numerous connections with Muse. The X account is connected to a Substack posting the same exact articles that Muse publishes on his LinkedIn page, which also has the username “amuse”, reflecting his first initial and last name. Muse’s book on how to secure startup funding, which includes examples of him asking ChatGPT to pretend it’s Musk and offer business advice, lists that same Substack account as its publisher.Prominent accounts including Musk have shared and replied to @amuse’s posts, which recently have included AI depictions of Trump fighting Darth Vader and sexualized imagery of Harris. Its banner picture is currently an AI-generated photo of Trump surrounded by women in “Swifties” shirts. The account posts misleading, pro-Trump headlines such as claiming Harris turned hundreds of thousands of children over to human traffickers as “border czar”. The headlines, like the AI-generated Swifties for Trump images, come with the watermark “sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Foundation”.The John Milton Freedom Foundation, named after the 17th-century British poet and essayist, has a small online footprint: a website, an investor prospectus and an X account with fewer than 500 followers. The team behind it, according to its own documents, consists of five people based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area with varying degrees of experience in Republican politics. Muse’s daughter, described as a 10th grade honor student on the non-profit’s site, serves as the Milton Foundation’s “fellowship chair”.The foundation’s stated goal is to raise $2m from major donors to award $100,000 grants to a list of “fellows” made up of rightwing media influencers. These include people like the former CBS journalist turned far-right star Lara Logan, who was cut from Newsmax in recent years for going on a QAnon-inspired rant that claimed world leaders drink children’s blood, as well as the author of an anti-trans children’s book. The organization believes that this money would allow these already established influencers to “increase their reach by more than 10x in less than a year”, according to its investor prospectus.While only one of the fellows listed on the foundation’s site mentions the organization on their X profiles and none follow its account, the @amuse account has a prominent link to the group’s community page and the foundation often engages with its posts.It is not clear that the foundation has any money to give and if all the media influencers listed as its 2024 fellowship class know about the organization. One Texas-based account that posts anti-vaccine content lists itself as a “JMFF” fellow in their bio, but none of the others advertise any connection. The most recent tax records for the Freedom Foundation place it in the category of non-profits whose gross receipts, or total funds received from all sources, range from $0 to $50,000 – far below the millions it is seeking.The organization’s board includes its chair, Brad Merritt, who is touted as an experienced Republican organizer with claims to have raised $300m for various non-profits; its director, Shiree Sanchez, who served as assistant director of the Republican party of Texas between 1985 and 1986; and Mark Karaffa, a retired healthcare industry executive.Muse’s experience in digital media appears to be far more extensive than the non-profit’s other members. In addition to his blog, he claims to have worked with James O’Keefe, the former CEO of the rightwing organization Project Veritas, who was known for hidden camera stings until he was ousted last year over allegations of misplaced funds. Muse, who is described in the prospectus as a “serial entrepreneur”, also blogs about how to make money from generative AI. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump and Musk’s talk of a cabinet position is all hot air, but we shouldn’t ignore it | Brian Merchant

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      What if Elon Musk went to Washington to serve in Donald Trump’s White House? There have been worse pitches for a comedy sketch, I suppose. Veep’s Armando Iannucci could probably do something with it. Sadly, the notion is all too real. Sort of.A Reuters reporter recently asked Trump whether he’d consider appointing Musk to his cabinet. “He’s a very smart guy,” Trump responded. “I certainly would, if he would do it, I certainly would. He’s a brilliant guy.” Musk replied with an AI-generated rendering of himself alongside a decade-old crypto meme and tweeted, “I am willing to serve.” It’s not the first time the idea has come up – Trump floated the possibility in May – but it is the first time that Musk has responded in the affirmative, winkingly or otherwise.The exchange is the culmination of an escalating series of displays of awkward amity and mutual admiration between the two, who were on icy terms as recently as this spring. The two are, after all, cut from remarkably similar cloth. Each demands attention the way a flame demands oxygen: incessantly, and at any cost.We can all but count out the idea of Musk becoming an actual cabinet member, or taking on any role that would require him to officially step away from his job as CEO at a half-dozen companies (Tesla, SpaceX, X, Neuralink, the Boring Company and xAI, as of last counting). More than any other founder, Musk is his companies, and they are him. Investors are not backing an auto manufacturer. They are backing Tesla, the revolutionary EV company with self-driving features piloted by the richest and second-most omnipresent man on the planet. Musk knows as well as anyone that if he stepped away, his companies’ stock values would plummet, his fortune alongside them. As funny as it is to imagine Musk, secretary of energy, fumbling his way through a press conference about natural gas prices, it’s not going to happen.That we must even consider taking such a thing seriously is a testament to just how powerfully both men have distorted the nature of our heavily mediated reality through trolling and sheer force of ego. And, unfortunately, I think we should take it seriously! Not because it is at all likely to happen but because it’s worth examining what the entreaty itself reveals about Trump and Musk’s relationship and the relinquishing of a once pivotal platform – X, formerly Twitter – to forces preoccupied with conspiracy and propaganda at this precarious moment.It’s hard to remember now, but Musk long proclaimed himself a moderate in politics. He didn’t much wade into the fray, save to accept the tax credits handed to his companies by Obama’s stimulus bill, and lob the occasional bromide. Why would he? Through 2015, his companies enjoyed nearly $5bn in subsidies sent his way by Democratic policies, and by running a standard-bearing electric car company, he was beloved by liberals.Since then, Musk has been on a rightward drift – until he bought Twitter in 2022, turned it into X, and that drift became a lurch. Perhaps criticism over the treatment of workers at the flagship Tesla plant or a growing obsession with identity politics spurred him on. He’s taken to boosting rightwing content, sharing transphobic memes, promoting baseless conspiracy theories about Democrats, complaining about immigration, and stoking racial division in the UK. By the time Trump survived an assassination attempt in July, Musk was well primed – he immediately endorsed the former president, and has been all-in ever since.Trump made his long awaited return to the social network following Musk’s endorsement. So far, he’s posted campaign ads and an AI-generated image of Kamala Harris as a communist leader. Ugly but typical stuff. Musk hosted Trump on Spaces, a livestream feature of X, where, after a half an hour of technical difficulties, they set about rambling for two hours, talking past each other about immigration, Harris and nuclear bombings. The two have done a dance of public online friendship – posting AI-generated images of each other, exchanging laudatory remarks in the press, and now, musing about Musk in a Trump White House. The rendering Musk posted on Tuesday depicted him at a podium labeled Department of Governmental Efficiency, or Doge, a reference to the half-joke cryptocurrency that Musk has found endlessly amusing for years, Dogecoin. He made it a weak punchline on SNL.Where once Musk may have claimed impropriety, and argued that X was a centrist platform free of political bent, now that’s all out the window. X has openly become a place where rightwing memes, projects and baseless conspiracy theories are amplified directly by its owner and most-followed user (195 million as of writing). It is what much of the online right has said it has always wanted: a social network that caters to its policy and cultural preferences and is not censored by those meddling liberals. The social network is a shadow of its former self; hemorrhaging advertisers and credibility, though it has held its place as the center of American political news.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump remains one of the world’s most noxious content creators, notorious for egging on the January 6 riots in tweets. That earned him a three-year exile to the obscure partisan wilds of Truth Social. What happens when the owner of his preferred platform is an ally and a fellow election conspiracy theorist – and instead of turning off the tap, can jack up the heat? Misinformation experts are bracing themselves.Trump and Musk’s alliance is in its infancy. If the election takes a darker turn and Trump again refuses to recognize the election results, we can expect that Musk, a potential member of a Trump cabinet, will exacerbate any ensuing chaos.The truth that undergirds Musk’s deepening bond with Trump is that he doesn’t have to go to Washington to wield influence over our institutions. With his vast wealth, addled megaphone and Trump’s ear – he already does. More

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      in US Politics

      Iranian group used ChatGPT to try to influence US election, OpenAI says

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      OpenAI said on Friday it had taken down accounts of an Iranian group for using its ChatGPT chatbot to generate content meant for influencing the US presidential election and other issues.The operation, identified as Storm-2035, used ChatGPT to generate content focused on topics such as commentary on the candidates on both sides in the US elections, the conflict in Gaza and Israel’s presence at the Olympic Games and then shared it via social media accounts and websites, Open AI said.Investigation by the Microsoft-backed AI company showed ChatGPT was used for generating long-form articles and shorter social media comments.OpenAI said the operation did not appear to have achieved meaningful audience engagement.The majority of the identified social media posts received few or no likes, shares or comments and the company did not see indications of web articles being shared across social media.The accounts have been banned from using OpenAI’s services and the company continues to monitor activities for any further attempts to violate policies, it said.Earlier in August, a Microsoft threat-intelligence report said the Iranian network Storm-2035, comprising four websites masquerading as news outlets, was actively engaging US voter groups on opposing ends of the political spectrum.The engagement was being built with “polarizing messaging on issues such as the US presidential candidates, LGBTQ rights, and the Israel-Hamas conflict”, the report stated.The Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, and her Republican rival, Donald Trump, are locked in a tight race, ahead of the presidential election on 5 November.The AI firm said in May it had disrupted five covert influence operations that sought to use its models for “deceptive activity” across the internet. More

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      in US Politics

      Google says Iranian group tried to hack Trump and Harris campaigns

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      Google said on Wednesday that an Iranian group linked to the country’s Revolutionary Guard has tried to infiltrate the personal email accounts of roughly a dozen people linked to Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris since May.The tech company’s threat intelligence arm said the group was still actively targeting people associated with Biden, Trump and Harris, who replaced the US president as the Democratic candidate last month when he dropped out. It said those targeted included current and former government officials, as well as presidential campaign affiliates.The new report from Google’s Threat Analysis Group affirms and expands on a Microsoft report released on Friday that revealed a suspected Iranian cyber intrusion in this year’s US presidential election. It sheds light on how foreign adversaries are ramping up their efforts to disrupt the election, which is less than three months away.Google’s report said its threat researchers detected and disrupted a “small but steady cadence” of the Iranian attackers using email credential phishing, a type of cyberattack in which the attacker poses as a trusted sender to try to get an email recipient to share their login details. John Hultquist, chief analyst for the company’s threat intelligence arm, said the company sends suspected targets of these attacks a Gmail popup that warns them that a government-backed attacker might be trying to steal their password.The report said Google observed the group gaining access to one high-profile political consultant’s personal Gmail account. Google reported the incident to the FBI in July. Microsoft’s Friday report shared similar information, noting that the email account of a former senior adviser to a presidential campaign had been compromised and weaponized to send a phishing email to a high-ranking campaign official.The group is familiar to Google’s threat intelligence arm and other researchers, and this is not the first time it has tried to interfere in US elections, Hultquist said. The report noted that the same Iranian group targeted both the Biden and Trump campaigns with phishing attacks during the 2020 cycle, as early as June of that year.The group also has been prolific in other cyber espionage activity, particularly in the Middle East, the report said. In recent months, as the Israel-Hamas war has aggravated tensions in the region, that activity has included email phishing campaigns targeted at Israeli diplomats, academics, non-governmental organizations and military affiliates.Trump’s campaign said on Saturday that it had been hacked and that sensitive internal documents had been stolen and distributed. It declared that Iranian actors were to blame.The same day, Politico revealed it had received leaked internal Trump campaign documents by email, though it was not clear whether the leaked documents were related to the suspected Iranian cyber activity. The Washington Post and the New York Times also received the documents.While the Trump campaign has not provided specific evidence linking Iran to the hack, both Trump and his longtime friend and former adviser Roger Stone have said they were contacted by Microsoft related to suspected cyber intrusions. Stone’s email was compromised by hackers targeting Trump’s campaign, a person familiar with the matter said.Google and Microsoft would not identify the people targeted in the Iranian intrusion attempts or confirm that Stone was among them. Google did confirm that the Iranian group in its report, which it calls APT42, was the same as the one in Microsoft’s research. Microsoft refers to the group as Mint Sandstorm.Harris’s campaign has declined to say whether it has identified any state-based intrusion attempts, but has said it vigilantly monitors cyber threats and is not aware of any security breaches of its systems.The FBI on Monday confirmed that it was investigating the intrusion into the Trump campaign. Two people familiar with the matter said the FBI was also investigating attempts to gain access to the Biden-Harris campaign.The reports of Iranian hacking come as US intelligence officials have warned of persistent and mounting efforts from both Russia and Iran to influence the US election through online activity. Beyond these hacking incidents, groups linked to the countries have used fake news websites and social media accounts to churn out content that appears intended to sway voters’ opinions.While neither Microsoft nor Google specified Iran’s intentions in the US presidential race, officials have previously hinted that Iran particularly opposes Trump. They have also expressed alarm about Tehran’s efforts to seek retaliation for a 2020 strike on an Iranian general that was ordered by Trump.Iran’s mission to the United Nations, when asked about the claim of the Trump campaign, denied being involved.“We do not accord any credence to such reports,” the mission told the Associated Press. “The Iranian government neither possesses nor harbors any intent or motive to interfere in the United States presidential election.”The mission did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday about Google’s report. More

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      Kamala’s tech ties: what is Harris’s relationship with Silicon Valley?

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      About 700 wealthy Democratic supporters packed into San Francisco’s Fairmont hotel on Sunday to see Kamala Harris in her first return to the city since launching her campaign for president. Among the crowd at the fundraiser, where the cheapest tickets cost $3,300 and went up to $500,000, was a mixture of tech billionaires, executives and Silicon Valley venture capitalists who have quickly embraced the vice-president in her bid for the White House.The event, which raised more than $12m, was the latest in the Harris campaign’s outreach to tech Democrats and an extension of a relationship with Silicon Valley elites that goes back more than a decade.Harris has extensive ties to some of the tech industry’s most influential players and prolific donors, in part due to her time as California’s attorney general and later, senator. While her campaign has yet to release detailed policy positions on issues such as tech regulation, Harris’s track record has led tech executives to speculate whether she could take a friendlier approach to the industry than Joe Biden has.Among the tech industry Democrats who have promoted or contributed to the Harris campaign are former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg; LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who attended the fundraiser in San Francisco, as well as philanthropist Melinda French Gates, IAC chair Barry Diller and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ron Conway. Laurene Powell Jobs, billionaire philanthropist and former wife of Apple’s Steve Jobs, is a longtime friend and in 2013 held a fundraiser at her home for Harris. Netflix chairman Reed Hastings, who publicly called on the president to drop out after his disastrous debate performance, donated $7m to a pro-Harris Super PACac within days of her becoming the presumptive nominee.Some of these donors have arrived to Harris’s campaign with their own policies to promote, most notably Hoffman and Diller’s demands to fire Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair Lina Khan. The FTC under Khan has taken an aggressive stance toward regulating big tech, pursuing cases against Microsoft and Amazon, which has rankled the industry. (Hoffman is a board member of Microsoft, which has been the target of FTC antitrust litigation.)Hoffman and Diller’s demands to remove Khan while donating heavily to Harris give the appearance of billionaire donors trying to sway policy for their personal benefit, despite denials from Hoffman that his contribution is in exchange for influence. Harris has yet to comment on Khan or the donations from her critics, meanwhile her campaign held an organizing event featuring Hoffman in early August following his attacks on the FTC chair.In addition to big-name donors, Harris has also received public pledges of support from hundreds of other venture capitalists and tech workers. A “VCs For Kamala” site featured more than 800 signatures from a variety of firms, while Bloomberg reported that a Tech4Kamala open letter received more than 1,200 signatures. The two groups are planning to host an event later this month.As he fights Harris, Trump forges new ties in Silicon ValleyAlthough Harris may have more vocal tech backers than Biden, the industry has also undergone a conservative shift and embrace of far-right beliefs that gives her a number of prominent opponents. A San Francisco fundraiser for Donald Trump held last month by venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya raised about $12m, while Silicon Valley power players Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz announced they plan to make substantial donations to the former president.JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, also ran his campaign for Ohio senator with the help of approximately $15m in contributions from tech billionaire Peter Thiel, whose venture firm briefly employed Vance in 2015. Prior to becoming a senator, Vance worked in Silicon Valley, where he plugged in to a broader network of wealthy conservatives in tech.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionElon Musk, the world’s richest man, has openly backed Trump while promoting attacks against Harris and Democrats on his social media platform X. Musk shared a deepfake parody video on the platform last month which featured manipulated footage of Harris, in which she was made to say “I am the ultimate diversity hire.” Musk’s Grok chatbot also spread false information suggesting that Harris was ineligible to appear on the ballot in some states, prompting condemnation from Democratic lawmakers.On Monday, Musk held a more than two-hour interview with Trump in which the Tesla CEO lauded Trump and gave no pushback as Trump rehashed a variety of falsehoods and baseless election conspiracies.“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,” Joseph Costello, a Harris campaign spokesperson, said in a statement following the interview.California connections to big techAs state attorney general and then senator for California between 2010 and 2020, Harris was in office during a crucial period in the ascendance of Silicon Valley’s biggest social networks such as Facebook. Her record on legislation and litigation around tech has over the years alternatingly drawn applause from some regulation and privacy advocates and at times criticism from others that Harris didn’t attempt to rein in companies as they amassed monopolies.Harris enjoyed a fairly cozy relationship with the industry as attorney general, including developing a friendship with then Facebook COO Sandberg and participating in the PR campaign for Sandberg’s memoir Lean In. Sandberg gave the maximum legal individual contribution to her 2016 senate campaign and, according to emails acquired by HuffPost, sent Harris a message two days after that election that read “CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!!!!!!! We need you now more than ever.” Harris did not respond.During Harris’s time as attorney general, Facebook acquired both Instagram and WhatsApp in moves that helped it expand its dominance over social media. Antitrust advocates have since criticized federal regulators and state officials for failing to more intensely investigate or block those deals, with the FTC citing the acquisitions as evidence of anticompetitive practices in its antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. Harris has tended to stay away from taking a firm stance on antitrust actions, and in 2019 gave a vague answer to a direct question from the New York Times on whether big tech companies should be broken up.View image in fullscreenAreas where Harris took a more aggressive approach toward the tech industry were online privacy and sexual abuse, choosing what’s often called “revenge porn” as her marquee issue to fight. As a senator, Harris has introduced legislation and backed initiatives to criminalize sharing nonconsensual sexual images online, an issue that has become more pertinent in recent years with the rise of sexualized deepfakes of celebrities, politicians and average citizens. Her strategy with big tech companies on the issue, Politico reported in 2019, was to take a less publicly adversarial stance and instead forge relationships with executives who could change platform policies.When Harris chose to take legal action that involved tech companies, she instead tended to focus on smaller platforms or individual incidents of cybercrime. One of Harris’s most prominent prosecutions as attorney general was against the CEO and controlling shareholders of Backpage, an adult classifieds site that Harris accused of enabling illegal sex work, abuse and human trafficking. The prosecution, which Harris has touted in campaign ads, remains controversial and was heavily opposed by sex worker activists who viewed Backpage as a means to safely vet clients and avoid working on the streets. The founder of Backpage and two executives were convicted of prostitution and money laundering charges; a federal judge acquitted them on appeal.Harris’s record as a prosecutor shows other examples she could claim show that she’s tough on tech even as she maintains close relationships with the industry’s power brokers. She threatened to sue Uber as attorney general in 2016 after the company vowed to break state laws and put driverless cars on San Francisco streets without regulatory approval. Uber ultimately relented and ended its driverless tests days later. Meanwhile, Tony West, who became Uber’s chief legal officer a year after Harris threatened legal action, is now one of her campaign’s best-connected fundraisers. He’s also her brother-in-law. More

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      So Donald chatted with Elon, and here’s the future as they see it – losers win, incompetence rules | Marina Hyde

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      Would you like to travel in the advance party to Mars, aboard the space rocket of a man who can’t sort a livestream? Ideally you would have to get in line for this species-level honour behind thousands of Earth’s leading shitposters, who not only trust implicitly in X owner Elon Musk, but truly believe that if they grind away for hours a day telling him that on his platform, one day he will see one of those posts. I hope he does, guys!In the meantime, my favourite recent headline on this interplanetary settlement programme ran “Elon Musk denies his sperm will seed Mars colony”. Sure. It’s just a hunch, but I feel like they’re going to have way more sperm than they need up there. It’s the other bit necessary for human life that you sense will be in shorter supply.Anyway, from the future of the red mist planet to the future of political discourse: Monday night’s conversation between Musk and Donald Trump on X (audio only, only almost an hour late, and only for massively fewer live listeners than advance estimates suggested). It was so dysfunctional that even Trump’s dentures were trying to escape. Hours after it had taken place, Musk issued an intriguing APB: “Anyone have a More