In furtherance of his goal of making his social media site, X, the world’s top source of “news,” Elon Musk acknowledged that the platform is suppressing posts with links to articles and other sources of actual information.
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Self-avowed “free-speech absolutist” Elon Musk is trying to get the audience of his social media platform X to stop consuming actual news so that like-minded users will instead get their information from memes, anecdotes, and unsubstantiated claims.
This will make it easier for the billionaire, who seems to have tweaked the site’s algorithm to promote certain content (like his own and that of like-minded conservative influencers), to control what X users see and believe.
This low-level form of brainwashing makes the prospect of Musk achieving his stated goal of X becoming the world’s top “news” site (while destroying actual journalism in the process) so frightening.
On Sunday, he acknowledged that his platform is suppressing the visibility of posts that contain links, i.e., those that allow users to read source material and then make up their own minds.
It all began when Paul Graham, a programmer and investor with nearly 2 million followers, criticized X for de-prioritizing posts with links.
“It bothers me more than all the new right-wing trolls,” he wrote. “Trolls I’m used to, but what draws me to Twitter is to find out what’s going on, and you can’t do that without links.”
He is right, of course.
We are living in a complex world with complex problems that require complex solutions. This is not something you can explain with memes or the story of how someone’s grandma heard from her neighbor that a Haitian ate a cat.
Yet that is precisely the content Musk promotes because facts are poison to the propaganda and misinformation he spreads (and allows others to disseminate).
It would be better for society if all people were given actual information, e.g., through linking to studies, polls, official documents, etc., so that they were able to then make up their own minds.
And these are the kinds of links one can find in (reputable) news articles.
Sadly, Musk is trying to suppress all of that information.
He admitted as much when he responded to Graham’s post.
“Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply,” Musk wrote. “This just stops lazy linking.”
Of course, the billionaire is one of the main culprits (and look at all those links in that article) when it comes to lazily amplifying tweets containing misinformation.
In fact, his own artificial intelligence program Grok identified Musk as one of the greatest spreaders of false information.
What is especially grotesque is that he claims to be an arbiter of truth.
All of this should be deeply troubling to anybody who supports democracy and a free society in which people can think for themselves instead of having a couple of right-wing billionaires do their thinking for them.
Perhaps the worst part is that Musk is virtually untouchable, not just because he is the richest person on the planet but also because he helped put a government in place in the US that will protect him and further his business interests.
And now he has set his sights on the next target.
In another post Sunday, he referred to the UK, which has a left-of-center government, as a tyrannical police state (after already having contributed to spending misinformation during right-wing riots there earlier this year).
From Musk’s perspective, all of this makes sense. After all, if you are hellbent on spreading misinformation, the last thing you want is fact-checkers who at least provide some sort of accountability.
Sadly, he has the power of reducing the visibility of one of the last guardrails keeping him in check.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
