In the second of two episodes on Elon Musk, Matt and Sam examine key moments in the billionaire’s political derangement, his purchase of Twitter, and his role in Trump’s second term.
This post was originally published on Dissent Magazine.
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X has lost its case to invalidate a $610,500 penalty issued by the eSafety Commissioner for inadequately reporting on efforts to combat child sexual exploitation and abuse material last year. The social media giant argued it was not required to comply with the transparency reporting notice because it was issued to its predecessor Twitter Inc, a…
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During a speech on Thursday at the Economic Club of New York, former President Donald Trump suggested that he would enlist multi-billionaire Elon Musk to work in his administration and help him make cuts to government spending. Musk, who owns Tesla, X (formerly Twitter) and SpaceX, apparently made the suggestion to Trump himself, the Republican nominee for president explained.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has finally admitted what we knew all along: Facebook conspired with the government to censor individuals expressing “disapproved” views about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Zuckerberg’s confession comes in the wake of a series of court rulings that turn a blind eye to the government’s technofascism.
In a 2-1 decision in Children’s Health Defense v. Meta, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit brought by Children’s Health Defense against Meta Platforms for restricting CHD’s posts, fundraising, and advertising on Facebook following communications between Meta and federal government officials.
In a unanimous decision in the combined cases of NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice, the U.S. Supreme Court avoided ruling on whether the states could pass laws to prohibit censorship by Big Tech companies on social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.
And in a 6-3 ruling in Murthy v. Missouri , the Supreme Court sidestepped a challenge to the federal government’s efforts to coerce social media companies into censoring users’ First Amendment expression.
Welcome to the age of technocensorship.
On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.
In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.
Case in point: internal documents released by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government confirmed what we have long suspected: that the government has been working in tandem with social media companies to censor speech.
By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.
This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.
The revelations that Facebook worked in concert with the Biden administration to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation, followed on the heels of a ruling by a federal court in Louisiana that prohibits executive branch officials from communicating with social media companies about controversial content in their online forums.
Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”
This is the very definition of technofascism.
Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.
The government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.
Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.
As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”
Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.
The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.
Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.
In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.
Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will all be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.
This is how it starts.
First, the censors went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “hate speech.”
Then they went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “disinformation” about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden.
By the time so-called extremists found themselves in the crosshairs for spouting so-called “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists.
Eventually, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.
Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.
Watch and learn.
We should all be alarmed when any individual or group—prominent or not—is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.
Given what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.
Here’s the point: you don’t have to like or agree with anyone who has been muzzled or made to disappear online because of their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now will eventually be used against you by tyrants of your own making.
Eventually, as Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.
If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s happening already.
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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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X owner Elon Musk’s reshare of a manipulated, faux campaign ad for Vice President Kamala Harris on social media last week raised alarms because he did not disclose that the clip, which parroted rightwing takes about the likely Democratic nominee, was a parody. But experts warn that the move illuminates AI’s potential to further embed distrust of election institutions in among voters ahead of the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The eSafety Commissioner has abandoned its Federal Court case against Elon Musk’s X, just days after two prominent US digital rights groups were approved to intervene in the matter. In a statement released on Wednesday, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant announced that the regulator would be discontinuing its Federal Court action attempting to force X…
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A pair of major US digital rights organisations have been approved to intervene in the eSafety Commissioner’s ongoing case against Elon Musk’s X in another blow to the Australian agency’s legal battle. A Federal Court judge ruled earlier this week that Electronic Frontiers Foundation and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression can intervene in…
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UOL (4/11/24)
Libertarian pundit Michael Shellenberger on April 3 tweeted a series of excerpts from emails by X executives, dubbed “Twitter Files Brazil”, which alleged to expose crimes by Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Moraes, he claimed, had pressed criminal charges against Twitter Brazil‘s lawyer for its refusal to turn over personal information on political enemies. Elon Musk quickly shared the tweets and they viralized and were embraced by the international far right, to the joy of former President Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters.
A week later, Estela Aranha, former secretary of digital rights in the Brazilian Justice Ministry, revealed rot at the heart of Shellenberger’s narrative. The only criminal charge filed against Twitter Brazil referenced in the leaked emails was made by the São Paulo district attorney’s office, after the company refused to turn over personal data on a leader of Brazil’s largest cocaine trafficking organization, the PCC. Shellenberger had cut the section of an email about a São Paulo criminal investigation and mixed it with communications complaining about Moraes on unrelated issues.
Pressed by Brazilian reporters, Shellenberger wrote: “I regret my my mistake and apologize for it. I don’t have evidence that Moraes threatened to file criminal charges against Twitter‘s Brazilian lawyer.”
The following interview with Estela Aranha was conducted on April 13, 2024.
Brian Mier: What was your role in Brazil’s Ministry of Justice? Please give an example of a project you worked on.
Estela Aranha
Estela Aranha: I started as special advisor to the minister of justice for digital affairs. Later, I was appointed secretary of digital rights. One project that I helped coordinate, along with other departments in the Ministry of Justice and the Federal Police, was called Operation Safe Schools, which was created to prevent school massacres.
In March 2023, a series of attacks and random child murders began in schools across the country, and thousands of school massacre threats vitalized in the social media. This created a generalized mood of panic and hysteria. Users were spreading images of school attackers with the goal of spreading terror. Consequently, increasing numbers of panicked parents pulled their children out of school.
In addition to spreading images of school killings, people were working online to encourage others to commit similar attacks. We began to monitor this phenomenon on the social media networks, and our initial analysis showed that neo-Nazi groups were encouraging attacks on April 20, because it was the anniversary of Columbine, and the Columbine massacre was committed on Adolf Hitler’s birthday. They were contacting children and teenagers online and trying to encourage them to attack other children in schools.
It was a national issue that paralyzed the country. In some cities during the week before April 20, only 20% of children were attending school because of the generalized sense of panic.
Operation Safe Schools worked in partnership with social media companies so that content inciting school killings would be properly moderated. We created a reporting channel. All reports were analyzed. The operation was huge, in terms of the number of people involved and the intelligence deployed.
We had very significant results, including 360 arrests. Not all, but the vast majority of people who were involved in these threats and these attacks, and who we had evidence would commit this type of crime—people who were arrested with detailed plans, weapons, masks, everything—were affiliated with clandestine neo-Nazi groups. Everyone who advocated Nazism was also reported to the police, and these individuals were detained and charged, according to due process, because advocating for Nazism is a crime in Brazil.
NPR (4/15/23)
BM: Did you ask social media companies to remove user profiles during this operation?
EA: Yes. We met with representatives from all the social media companies—we spoke with all of them. The only one that didn’t engage in dialogue was Telegram. During our the first meeting, Twitter initially resisted. It didn’t want to remove them. We were talking about profiles that were promoting very realistic attacks on schools.
I said, “I’m talking to you because there are profiles of actual terrorist personas. They are fake profiles using the names and faces of school massacre terrorists that post videos with songs that say, ‘I’m going to get you kids, you can’t run faster than my gun.’ There are video clips that show the terrorist’s picture and then show real school massacres.”
The Twitter representative said that this did not violate their terms of use. After strong push-back from the minister of justice and social pressure, including from users of its own platform, Twitter changed its policy and collaborated with the investigation.
BM: Do you think there was a positive effect in de-platforming those people? Did it reduce the risk for children?
EA: Of course. These were people sharing videos promoting and glorifying the perpetrators of school massacres. Imagine a teenager who already has issues and suffers from bullying, who is bombarded with images glorifying school massacres and messages like, “Look, this guy is awesome. Look what he did!”
Some kids will say, “Great. Nobody respects me, I don’t know what to do, so I’ll do this to be respected.”
All the guys who were arrested, who left letters or made statements, summed it up like this: “I was despised, nobody cared about me. I’m going to do this to show that I’m tough, that I’m somebody.”
They thought they were doing it to get revenge, to be glorified, to be seen differently. Any material that glorifies terrorism, whether it’s a school attack or any kind of terrorist attack, leads some people to think it’s good to commit a terrorist act. This is scientifically proven, by the way.
The other thing about this wave of school massacre threats is that it created an atmosphere of fear. If you logged onto Twitter or any social network at the time, started seeing these crimes, these scenes, how were you going to send your children to school? We had many parents who kept their children out of school during the whole three weeks of the crisis.
Imagine the impact on people’s lives without being able to send their children to school. Imagine the mothers who depend on sending their children to school in order to work, to have a normal life. There were thousands of testimonies of children crying, saying, “I’m going to be stabbed at school.”
Imagine the psychological impact—school should be a safe place for children, right? Imagine a parent who browses on any social network like Twitter and sees a bunch of people promoting terrorism in schools. What parent would send their child to school after that? What child would feel comfortable and want to go to school? This created an impact on the entire Brazilian society. Mothers couldn’t work and daughters were terrified to go to school. School ceased to be a place where children felt safe—they started to be afraid of it.
BM: How did you discover that Michael Shellenberger was lying in the so-called “Twitter Files”?
EA: I am lawyer and digital rights specialist, and I began working in the Justice Ministry shortly after the period from which the emails used in “Twitter Files Brazil” were selected. I am familiar with all of those cases and decisions. I am familiar with all the rulings in my field that are in circulation. As a lawyer who is part of a group who specializes in this area—and they’re aren’t many of us—we obviously share, discuss and debate all of these cases and rulings. I remember the case filed by the São Paulo Public Prosecutor’s Office against Twitter, because we all talked about it when it happened.
So when I read the email excerpts that Michael Shellenberger posted, I immediately saw that they had been manipulated. I immediately knew what decision each email fragment referred to. I am familiar with all the important rulings on social media networks that happened during the time period of the emails. The moment I saw it I thought, “No, that never happened,” because I follow this very closely—it’s my job.
When I read it, I said to myself, “This is wrong.” He was speaking incorrectly, and this is why I complained about it online. I knew they had fabricated a false narrative, because I know all of the cases that they cherry-picked their text fragments from. They stitched together excerpts. Anyone who doesn’t know what they’re referring to could believe them. But I know about all the cases, because I am a dedicated lawyer. There is no case in my area that I don’t study, in order to understand what is happening. There is nothing they presented in the “Twitter Files” that I hadn’t been closely following.
BM: Musk and Shellenberger are alleging that the Brazilian government is violating the right to freedom of expression. But it seems that the arguments they make are based on US law. What are some differences in freedom of expression laws between Brazil and the US?
EA: There are several universal rights in each country or region, and in each legal tradition. I will speak about Brazil. Both legislation and doctrinal legal tradition—the interpretation of doctrine, as well as jurisprudence—are very different here. The right to freedom of expression in the United States is a right that is held above other rights—it is broader.
My colleagues who know more about American law than me tell me that, for example, the United States has never managed to criminalize revenge porn—when you expose intimate data of a former partner from whom you separated. This speaks legions about the breadth of freedom of expression that exists in the United States. It is not absolute, but it is a very broad right.
In Brazil, as in Europe, freedom of expression is an essential right that is equal to other essential rights. If you try to use one right to infringe upon another right, you will face limitations. All rights are weighed side by side, and there is proportionality in the scope of how much you can interfere.
For example, advocating for Nazism is illegal in Brazil, because it is considered to be such a harmful discourse that it must be preemptively prohibited. That doesn’t exist in the United States. Racist insults are crimes, as is discrimination against the LGBTQ+ population. There are several forms of speech that are illegal. And there are some types of speech that are not inherently illegal, but can lead to lawsuits for moral damages in certain cases.
This gradation obviously depends on the legal good that we are protecting. For example, advocacy for a crime, in general, is considered a form of criminal speech. So it is prohibited; it has to be taken out of circulation. Also, you cannot make threats.
Shellenberger mixes all kinds of unrelated things together in his “Twitter Files.” He mixes things from criminal cases, things from the São Paulo public prosecutors office, electoral crime investigations, and inquiries from the the Supreme Court and the Superior Electoral Court.
Freedom of expression has many restrictions in our electoral law framework, because we have other values that take precedence—for example, the equilibrium of an election. We have laws guaranteeing balanced elections and integrity of the electoral system itself.
The practice that is common in the United States, of a candidate paying for a lot of campaign advertising, is not allowed in Brazil. There is a system of free electoral advertising space. It is pre-divided among the candidates. Candidates cannot take out any advertisements over their established time limits, even if they can pay for it.
The circulation of all campaign materials is highly regulated. There are spending caps on election campaigns. TV stations cannot give more airtime to favor one candidate over another. There always has to be equivalence.
It is clear that a tightly regulated election system like ours has rules to protect it. During our election seasons, which typically last for less than four months, governmental agencies pull information down from their websites, leaving nothing but emergency or public utility information, because otherwise it could interfere with the electoral process by favoring government officials who are running for office. This could interfere with the balance of the election. It is also illegal to run negative campaign adds.
There are a lot of rules that are very different from the United States. You cannot, for example, use knowingly false information in election campaigns. This is a crime in Brazil. If candidates make patently false statements, the media cannot replicate the information.
This always leads to a lot of electoral court rulings and, during 2022, they weren’t only made in favor of President Lula. Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign successfully petitioned the court to remove several of Lula’s campaign ads and numerous social media posts by Lula supporters. There are thousands of court rulings demanding removal of advertising materials in every election campaign in Brazil. This is absolutely normal here.
But Micheal Shellenberger has decided to use US laws regarding freedom of expression to criticize decisions based on Brazilian law, made by our electoral courts. Shellenberger is using a totally different concept, which he even mentioned when he testified in a hearing in the Brazilian Senate this week. Advocacy for Nazism is tolerated in the United States. In Brazil, it is not. We have a very different system. He cannot use American legislation as a measuring rod to claim that a Brazilian court ruling is wrong.
There is a lot of deliberate confusion in “Twitter Files Brazil.” He grabs a lot of things and mixes them to create his narrative and arguments. He claimed that Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes threatened to arrest Twitter‘s lawyer, and then he was forced to admit that it wasn’t true. It’s obvious that he mixed different things together on purpose. It makes no sense to say that Moraes is breaking the law—he isn’t. His rulings are legal according to Brazilian law.
The other thing that I think is relevant to mention is that in Brazilian law, judges can order precautionary measures, that we call “atypical,” to prevent further threats to rights from materializing. This is what Alexandre de Moraes has used in some of his rulings. This institution of Brazilian law is called the general precautionary power of the judge.
BM: What do you think is the real goal of these attacks made by Elon Musk and Michael Shellenberger and their allies?
Elon Musk (Creative Commons photo by Tim Reckmann)
EA: Shellenberger and Musk are working hand in hand, and I’m sure their goal is to be players in the US elections, and that’s why they have joined the international far right. Obviously they have chosen Brazil because it is also an important player in the international far right. They have taken advantage of all this discourse about regulating social media, which Musk obviously opposes. But I think their immediate goal is to attack the established powers in Brazil.
Our far right was completely isolated, because its main leader is Bolsonaro and he couldn’t lead, because he was cornered: the criminal investigations against him for crimes that have been proven, thanks to very robust investigations by the Federal Police. He was powerless, because the whole coup plot has been uncovered by the Federal Police. He really tried to implement a coup d’état, together with military leaders, and there were direct actions, like the attack on the Federal Police headquarters the day Lula arrived in Brasilia to sign documents in preparation for his inauguration.
This attack was very serious, but some people seem to have already forgotten it. I was there. I personally witnessed a car full of jerry cans filled with gasoline parked in front of a gas station, and later jerry cans full of gasoline were found in the hotel where Lula was staying. There was an attempted bombing in Brasilia airport on Christmas, which only failed to explode because the detonator didn’t work. Then we had the attack on January 8, which was also very serious.
So at the moment when were were managing to finally hold the main leaders of this attempted coup accountable, Elon Musk and Michael Shellenberger came onto the scene to attack the institutions that are prosecuting them, to usurp their power so they can’t convict them anymore. That was clearly their short-term goal, and in the long run, Elon Musk obviously wants to be a player in the international far right, and interfere in elections around the world, especially in the US.
BM: Do you think they are trying to implement a coup?
EA: That’s part of it. The far right tried and never gave up on it. I was in the Ministry of Justice at the time, and we worked hard to contain the subversive elements that continued after January 8, 2023. After they began being held accountable, their activities decreased. But they want to reignite that flame by preventing Bolsonaro from being held accountable, by delegitimizing our court system. Of course, that’s part of the coup movement.
I think their first goal is to strengthen the far-right leadership again, because today they are weakened, they have no firepower to carry out this coup. That’s why they stepped in. They want to strengthen these leaders who are cornered, because they are being held responsible for the coup attempt.
This interview was originally posted on De-Linking Brazil (4/18/24), Brian Mier’s blog on Substack.
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“We can’t go beyond the laws of a country,” Musk has said (Wall Street Journal, 4/8/24)—unless, of course, he doesn’t like the government making the laws.
Elon Musk, the right-wing anti-union billionaire owner of Twitter (recently rebranded as X), has cast his defiance of a Brazilian judicial ruling as a free speech crusade against censorship. Such framing is, of course, bullshit. It is instead a political campaign by a capitalist to use social media to reshape global politics in favor of the right. And it’s important that we all understand why that is.
As Reuters (4/7/24) reported, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered “the blocking of certain accounts” on Twitter, prompting Musk to announce that Twitter would defy the judge’s orders “because they were unconstitutional.” He went on to call for Moraes’ resignation.
It isn’t clear which accounts are being targeted, but the judge is investigating “‘digital militias’ that have been accused of spreading fake news and hate messages during the government of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.” He’s also probing “an alleged coup attempt by Bolsonaro.”
The AP (4/8/24) then reported that the judge opened up an inquest into Musk directly, saying the media mogul “began waging a public ‘disinformation campaign’ regarding the top court’s actions.”
Musk claimed that he’s doing this in the name of free speech at the expense of profit, saying “we will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there” (Wall Street Journal, 4/8/24). He added that “principles matter more than profit.”
Michael Shellenberger (Public, 4/8/24), an enthusiastic pro-Musk pundit, was less restrained, saying the judge “has taken Brazil one step closer to being a dictatorship.” To Shellenberger, it’s “clear that Elon Musk is the only thing standing in the way of global totalitarianism.”
‘Par for the course’
Verge (1/25/23): “The documentary’s ban isn’t an example of Musk violating a vocal ‘free speech absolutist’ ethos. It’s a reminder that Musk has always been fine with government censorship.”
Anyone with a memory better than Shellenberger’s will recall that Musk’s Twitter has been all too eager to censor content at the request of the Indian government, including a BBC documentary that was critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi (Verge, 1/25/23). India under Modi, who heads the right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP party, has seen a steep decline in press freedom, worrying journalists and free speech advocates (New York Times, 3/8/23; NPR, 4/3/23; Bloomberg, 2/25/24). At the same time Musk was pretending to defend free speech in Brazil, he was bragging about traveling to India to meet with Modi (Twitter, 4/10/24).
Musk suppressed Twitter content in the Turkish election in response to a request from Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, saying the “choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?” This move, he insisted, was “par for the course for all Internet companies” (Vanity Fair, 5/14/23). Turkey, with its laws against insulting the Turkish identity (Guardian, 11/16/21), is a country that is almost synonymous with the suppression of free speech—it ranks 165 out of 180 on Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index. Yet Musk didn’t seem to feel the need to intervene to save democracy through his social media network.
The impact of Musk’s decision to censor Twitter when it comes to Turkey and India isn’t just that it exposes his duplicity when it comes to free speech, but it robs the global public of vital points of view when it comes to these geopolitically important countries. In essence, the crime is not so much that Musk is hypocritical, but that his administration of the social media site has kept readers in the dark rather than expanding their worldview.
Grappling with balance
AP (10/25/22) reported that Brazilian social media posts claimed that Lula “plan[ned] to close down churches if elected” and that Bolsonaro “confess[ed] to cannibalism and pedophilia.”
The context in Brazil is that in the last presidential election, in 2022, the leftist challenger Lula da Silva ousted the incumbent, Bolsonaro (NPR, 10/30/22), who has since been implicated in a failed coup attempt that closely resembled the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol (Reuters, 3/15/24). Ever since, tech companies have bristled at Brazil’s attempt to curb the influence of fake news, such as a bill that would put “the onus on the internet companies, search engines and social messaging services to find and report illegal material” (Guardian, 5/3/23).
Brazil experienced a flurry of disinformation about the candidates in the run-up to the election, inspiring the country’s top electoral court to ban “false or seriously decontextualized” content that “affects the integrity of the electoral process” (AP, 10/25/22).
The Washington Post (1/9/23) reported that social media were “flooded with disinformation, along with calls in Portuguese to ‘Stop the Steal,’” and demands for “a military coup” in response to a possible Lula victory. And while these problems existed in various online media, a source told the Post that this occurred after Musk fired people in Brazil “who moderated content on the platform to catch posts that broke its rules against incitement to violence and misinformation.”
While Turkey and India are brazenly attempting to suppress opinions the government doesn’t like, a democratic Brazil is grappling with how to balance maintaining a free internet while protecting elections from malicious interference (openDemocracy, 1/3/23).
Despotic future
Brazilian Report (4/9/24): “Billionaire Elon Musk joined this week a campaign led by the Brazilian far-right to characterize Brazil as a dictatorship.”
Lula’s victory, in addition to being a source of hope for Brazil’s poor and working class (Bloomberg, 4/25/23), was seen as a blow to the kind of right-wing despotism espoused by people like Bolsonaro, who represents a past of US-aligned terror-states that use military force to protect US interests and suppress egalitarian movements in the Western Hemisphere (Human Rights Watch, 3/27/19). As Brazilian Report (4/9/24) put it, Musk has joined a “campaign led by the Brazilian far right.”
Indeed, the Wall Street Journal (4/10/24) noted that Musk’s tussle in the Brazilian judiciary was an extension of his alignment with the Brazilian right:
Supporters of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, who gave Musk a medal during his visit in 2022 to announce plans to install satellites over the Amazon rainforest, have reveled in Musk’s defiance, declaring him a “hero,” as the dividing lines in Brazil’s culture wars deepen.
Erdoğan and Modi represent more successful iterations of neo-fascist ideology over liberal democracy. The dystopian societies they oversee make up the political model that the MAGA movement would like to impose in the United States, where a caudillo is unchecked by independent courts, the press and other civil institutions, while rights for workers and marginalized groups are eviscerated.
Musk isn’t simply displaying hypocrisy when he pretends to fight for free speech in Brazil while Twitter censors speech when it comes to India and Turkey. If anything, he is being consistent in his quest to use his corporate wealth to alter the political landscape against liberal democracy and toward a dark, despotic future.
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I wrote last November (FAIR.org, 11/22/23) about how Twitter owner Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Media Matters—alleging the group’s research “manipulated” data in an effort to “destroy” Musk’s social media platform—was an episode of a right-wing corporate media mogul using his wealth to crush free speech.
“Much appreciated!” declared Elon Musk in response to the Missouri attorney general’s probe (Riverfront Times, 3/25/24). “Media Matters is doing everything it can to undermine the First Amendment. Truly an evil organization.”
Now Musk’s friends in government are joining his efforts to silence his critics. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is suing Media Matters to demand internal documents, because he, like Musk, believes the group “manipulated Twitter‘s algorithm to create a report showing advertisements for normal companies on the platform appeared next to not-normal content, or what Bailey calls ‘contrived controversial posts,’” causing advertisers to flee (Riverfront Times, 3/25/24).
Bailey said in a statement (3/25/24):
My office has reason to believe Media Matters engaged in fraudulent activities to solicit donations from Missourians to intimidate advertisers into leaving X, the last social media platform committed to free speech in America….
Media Matters has pursued an activist agenda in its attempt to destroy X, because they cannot control it. And because they cannot control it, or the free speech platform it provides to Missourians to express their own viewpoints in the public square, the radical “progressives” at Media Matters have resorted to fraud to, as Benjamin Franklin once said, mark X “for the odium of the public, as an enemy to the liberty of the press.” Missourians will not be manipulated by “progressive” activists masquerading as news outlets, and they will not be defrauded in the process.
Bailey clearly wants to get into the fray that has caught up with right-wing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton (11/20/23) announced he was launching an investigation into “Media Matters, a radical anti-free speech organization.” He cited Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act as grounds for looking into whether Media Matters “fraudulently manipulated data on X.com“:
We are examining the issue closely to ensure that the public has not been deceived by the schemes of radical left-wing organizations who would like nothing more than to limit freedom by reducing participation in the public square.
As the government of Texas threatened to bring charges against a nonprofit organization for publishing a study of a multi-billion-dollar corporation, Musk posted the attorney general’s press release on X (11/20/23) and gloated, “Fraud has both civil and criminal penalties.”
McCarthyist witch hunt
It’s easy to write off Bailey and Paxton as partisan hacks who are using the power of the state as a public relations tool to win adulation in MAGA-land. But Musk’s ability to use the partisan prosecutors and the courts to engage in a McCarthyist witch hunt against the corporation’s critics is highly concerning.
A federal judge dismissed Musk’s complaint that the Center for Countering Digital Hate had “embarked on a scare campaign” (Verge, 3/25/24).
At around the same time as Bailey announced his crusade, federal Judge Charles Breyer dismissed Twitter’s lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (Verge, 3/25/24), saying that the company suing CCDH for researching hate speech on the site was “about punishing the defendants for their speech.” It’s good news that a sensible judge can protect free speech. But how long can that last against one of the world’s richest people, who has made it clear he has an agenda to silence critics, and the collaboration of powerful officials?
Former President Donald Trump left his mark on the judiciary, appointing “more than 200 judges to the federal bench, including nearly as many powerful federal appeals court judges in four years as Barack Obama appointed in eight” (Pew Research, 1/13/21). And Bailey and Paxton are not the only state attorneys general who are aligned with Trump and his political positions; Paxton was able to get 16 others to join with him in petitioning the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election (New York Times, 12/9/20).
Rather than turning Twitter into an open free-speech utopia, Musk’s administration of Twitter has been marked by aggressive censorship (Al Jazeera, 5/2/23). Reporters Without Borders (10/26/23) said that Musk’s removal of guardrails against disinformation has been so disastrous that it “regards X as the embodiment of the threat that online platforms pose to democracies.” After the National Labor Relations Board said that Musk’s SpaceX fired workers critical of him (Bloomberg, 1/3/24), the company argued that the NLRB’s structure was unconstitutional (Reuters, 2/15/24).
Musk is clearly inclined to use courts and friendly officials to censor his critics, as well as to shred labor rights. If Trump is elected later this year—which is entirely possible (CNN, 3/9/24)—Musk will have the ability to fuse his desire and resources to shut down critics with emboldened far-right government allies.
Bailey’s outrageous statement might seem silly and destined for the same fate as Musk’s case against the CCDH, but it portends a highly chilling environment if the courts and government agencies fall further into the hands of the right.
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X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has gutted its safety and public policy personnel and reinstated thousands of banned accounts since billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover, creating a “perfect storm” for online hate speech. The cuts to safety staff were confirmed by the company for the first time in disclosures to Australia’s online…
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Imagine waking up one morning to find out that the voice of your organization has been silenced. More uncanny is the fact that this suppression happened in the United States, a place we hold close to our hearts and where we believed, until recently, that free speech was valued. But that’s exactly what happened to us, Rasheed Ahmed of the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) and Sunita Viswanath…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has been kicked off the industry’s self-regulation effort on misinformation and disinformation because it removed user reporting tools and stopped cooperating with the industry group in charge. Industry group DIGI announced the decision today as part of upholding a complaint made against X by tech advocacy…
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Media Matters for America (11/16/23): “We recently found ads for Apple, Bravo, Oracle, Xfinity and IBM next to posts that tout Hitler and his Nazi Party on X.”
He wasn’t bluffing.
After threatening to sue liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America (CNBC, 11/18/23), Twitter’s principal owner Elon Musk did just that, arguing in papers filed in a Texas court that the group “manipulated” data in an effort to “destroy” the social media platform, causing major advertisers to pull back (BBC, 11/20/23).
The world’s richest human was responding to an MMFA report (11/16/23) about Twitter—which Musk has rebranded as X since purchasing the once publicly traded company—and its promotion of far-right, antisemitic content. It said that while “Musk continues his descent into white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories,” the social media network has been “placing ads for major brands like Apple, Bravo (NBCUniversal), IBM, Oracle and Xfinity (Comcast) next to content that touts Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.”
Elon Musk (BBC, 11/20/23) promised a “thermonuclear” lawsuit against anyone “who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.”
The report came just as the world stood in shock of Musk’s latest outburst of antisemitism: Just before the lawsuit was filed, he “publicly endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory popular among white supremacists: that Jewish communities push ‘hatred against whites’” (CNN, 11/17/23). This received widespread condemnation, including from the White House (Reuters, 11/17/23).
A few weeks earlier, the South African–born billionaire had endorsed the “white genocide” conspiracy theory (Mediaite, 10/27/23), a central myth of white supremacy: “They absolutely want your extinction,” he replied to a Twitter user who claimed that the melting down of a statue of Robert E. Lee was proof that “many seek our extinction.” The reported exodus of advertisers from Twitter in such a brief time span has been enormous (AP, 11/18/23).
The AP (11/20/23) reported that Twitter’s lawsuit claims MMFA “manipulated algorithms on the platform to create images of advertisers’ paid posts next to racist, incendiary content,” and that the lawsuit states that the instances of hateful content near such advertisements were “manufactured, inorganic and extraordinarily rare.” (By “manufactured,” Musk means that MMFA got its results by following far-right accounts on Twitter as well as the accounts of Twitter‘s major advertisers.)
Antisemitic vitriol
New York Times (12/2/22): Researchers said “they had never seen such a sharp increase in hate speech, problematic content and formerly banned accounts in such a short period on a mainstream social media platform.”
It isn’t a secret that antisemitic vitriol has increased on the site under Musk’s management (New York Times, 12/2/22; Washington Post, 3/20/23; Vice, 5/18/23). What’s different now is that the MMFA report and the anger toward his last outburst happened as he is losing the business he desperately needs, as the brand has been rapidly tanking since he spent $44 billion to acquire it (Fortune, 5/30/23).
The case was filed in Texas, although Twitter is based in California and MMFA is in Washington, DC. Musk’s choice of venue has everything to do with his right-wing politics and nothing to do with compliance with the law. Fast Company (11/21/23) wrote:
The case has been assigned to District Judge Mark Pittman, a Donald Trump appointee whose previous rulings include blocking President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan and declaring a Texas law banning people ages 18 to 20 from carrying handguns in public was unconstitutional.
Also, by filing in the state, the case can be heard by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has backed several conservative figures who claim they’ve been censored in the past.
MMFA is nevertheless confident that it will win the case; in a statement published by CNBC (11/18/23) before Musk’s suit was filed, Media Matters president Angelo Carusone declared:
Far from the free speech advocate he claims to be, Musk is a bully who threatens meritless lawsuits in an attempt to silence reporting that he even confirmed is accurate. Musk admitted the ads at issue ran alongside the pro-Nazi content we identified. If he does sue us, we will win.
Defamation cases are difficult for the plaintiff to win, especially in the case of someone like Musk, a public figure, who must prove that even false statements against them were intentional lies or made with “reckless disregard for the truth.” Legal experts cited by CNN (11/21/23) characterized the lawsuit as “weak” and “bogus.”
That doesn’t mean that legal fees, hours of working on the case and sleepless nights won’t impact MMFA’s work. In a case like this, a Goliath like Musk doesn’t need to win in court to hamper a David like MMFA, which reports an annual revenue of about $19 million and total assets of $26 million. That’s pennies in comparison to Musk, whose net worth is valued at nearly $200 billion (CBS News, 10/31/23). Mounting legal bills for oligarchs like Musk are as significant as a McDonald’s hamburger.
Rallying call for right
In the topsy-turvy world of the New York Post (11/21/23), billionaires who sue critics of hate speech are champions of free speech.
The suit is also a rallying call for the right, as former Fox News host Megyn Kelly (New York Post, 11/20/23) and the Federalist (11/21/23) are cheerleading the legal action. Greg Gutfeld of Fox News (11/21/23) welcomed the lawsuit, calling MMFA a “hard-left smear machine.” The New York Post editorial board (11/21/23), using Freudian projection, said the suit was a reaction to the liberal determination to “bring down Elon Musk for championing free speech.” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who fought to overturn the 2020 presidential election (Austin American-Statesman, 5/25/22), said he was opening an investigation into MMFA (The Hill, 11/21/23).
Musk—who is hostile to organized labor (NPR, 3/3/22; Forbes, 12/5/22), who has promoted anti-trans hate on Twitter (San Francisco Chronicle, 12/13/22; Business Insider, 1/2/23; The Nation, 6/23/23) and who backed Republicans in last year’s midterm elections (Politico, 11/7/22)—has become a darling of the right. A billionaire boss with socially conservative views, he has amped up the mythology that social media networks are somehow rigged against the right (Vox, 12/9/22; New York, 12/10/22; Daily Beast, 4/6/23; CNN, 6/6/23), and that his takeover of Twitter will lead to more balance.
What has resulted since his takeover is an unrelenting campaign of censorship. El País (5/24/23) reported that since his takeover, the platform “has approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments,” and has shown a particular interest in censoring critics of India’s right-wing regime (Intercept, 3/28/23). It has silenced left-wing voices at the behest of “far-right internet trolls” (Intercept, 11/29/22). And in order to silence criticism of Israel–an impulse that is not incompatible with antisemitism–Musk has threatened to suspend users who use the word “decolonization” or the phrase “from the river to the sea,” a reference to the original borders of historic Palestine before the proposed partition and Israel’s eventual founding (Mother Jones, 11/18/23). Journalists on the social media beat have been banned (CNN, 12/17/22; Daily Beast, 4/19/23).
Sinister forces
Media Matters (11/15/23): Musk has reinstated known white nationalists and antisemites on the platform” and “amplified conspiracy theories that were used to push antisemitism.”
MMFA was founded in 2004—in the midst of the “War on Terror” fervor of the George W. Bush years—by former right-wing journalist turned liberal consultant David Brock, who launched it to keep an eye on the rising influence of conservative news and talk shows (New York Times, 5/3/04). Its ongoing criticism of both Musk and corporate media like Fox News (Rolling Stone, 7/28/19) makes it the perfect target for the right. In the paranoid fantasyland of US conservatism, MMFA sits alongside George Soros, Black Lives Matter and Antifa as sinister forces who are out to undermine traditional social hierarchies.
And one can understand why Musk has a personal interest in going after MMFA, as the group (10/5/23, 11/13/23, 11/15/23) has focused on his politics and his administration of the website since he took it over.
I have written for several years about the right’s attempt to use the courts and legislatures to destroy press freedom to suppress reporting and opinions the rich and powerful don’t like (FAIR.org, 3/26/21, 5/25/22, 11/2/22, 3/1/23). The lawsuit sends a warning to reporters and advocates that can be easily interpreted: Musk isn’t just interested in taking over one social media network, but also drowning out the voices of anyone who challenges him. The point of this lawsuit is to intimidate anyone who speaks out against antisemitism, white supremacy and other forms of bigotry.
For those of us who care deeply about free speech and a free press, let’s hope this lawsuit is swiftly tossed out.
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