In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce further details about South African-American businessman and social media figure, Elon Musk (@elonmusk). He’s best-known for running companies like Tesla, SpaceX & Twitter/X, and for using the latter for political campaigning.

1/25

In this soup, I will focus on how his social media platform Twitter/X has become a cesspool filled with racism, propaganda & conspiracy theories. Elon himself, living fully in denial, has stated that “X has the truth” & that X is actually “the only place to find the truth”.

2/25

Elon has claimed that X’s community-driven content moderation program, Community Notes, corrects disinformation spread on X. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as most made-up stories are never Community Noted. And if they do, the notes are hardly ever seen by anyone.

3/25

Since Elon fired 80% of engineers who worked on X’s trust and safety, the moderation system on X has been in shambles. Allegedly, the decisions are AI-based and focus on volume - the more reports, the bigger the impact. Also, the bigger the account, the more difficult…

4/25

…it is to suspend, even in case of clear Terms of Service violations. One contributor said that the Notes system is “probably making the disinformation worse.” As of today, the company doesn’t have any full-time staff singularly dedicated to hateful conduct issues globally.
5/25

I have previously written about Elon being a massive social media megaphone, that can sway people’s opinions on basically anything. While garnering this following, he has also stumbled deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and extreme ideologies.

6/25

His recent pet peeve was the newly elected government in the UK, led by Keir Starmer. According to Elon, UK was a strong opponent of free speech, comparing their laws to those of Soviet Union. But Keir Starmer was a perfect target for Elon’s silly antics also for…

7/25

…another reason: his left-wing politics. In Aug 2024, violent riots erupted all around the UK after a Cardiff resident killed three and injured 10 in a stabbing in Southport, UK. Soon after this, large social media accounts, including Andrew Tate, Tommy Robinson,…

8/25

…and Nigel Farage started spreading disinformation that the attacker was an immigrant who had arrived to UK by boat in 2023. Elon quickly poured gas on the fire by criticizing the UK government for “suppressing free speech” after they arrested people provoking the riots.

9/25

As was mentioned before, most moderation resolutions on X are probably made by its AI, Grok. As any AI model is as good as its training data,Elon has harnessed all user data on X to train the model. This data is collected automatically, which is of course illegal in the EU.
10/25

Even though claiming otherwise, Elon yearns to be liked. After his Superbowl tweet did worse than Joe Biden’s, he pulled 80 engineers from their daily work and made them change the algorithm so that his tweets would be boosted massively and shown to basically everyone.

11/25

Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist”, which is a massive overstatement. According to El Pais, Elon has approved 83% censorship requests made by countries like India and Turkey. Elon claimed that “we can’t go beyond the laws of a country”, even though he had no…

12/25

…problems in threatening to shut down operations in Brazil after the country’s Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered X to block certain accounts associated with right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro who lost the elections in 2022. For some reason,…

13/25

…Elon hasn’t been very vocal about Saudi Arabia condemning a retired Saudi teacher to death over tweets. He also had no problem in selling X user data to a company called Dataminr, thus profiting from the sale of user data for government surveillance purposes.

14/25

For a strong supporter of free speech, Elon sure likes to sue people. According to @Jim_Edwards, Musk has filed at least 23 lawsuits in federal courts since Jul 2023. One of the judges even stated that his litigation was more about “revenge than justice”.

15/25

One of the biggest sources of disinformation on X is Elon himself. As of today, he’s the #54 most Community Noted account, and him sharing a fake newspaper headline posted by the co-leader of far-right party, Britain First, is just one example of bullshit he has promoted.

16/25

Throughout the years, Elon’s political stance has taken a HARD right turn. Today, he’s preaching the dangers of “woke mind virus” and supporting Donald Trump’s candidacy in the 2024 US elections, allegedly even donating him a large sum of money through his America PAC.

17/25

But don’t take my word for it, let’s ask Grok! According to Grok, X has suspended a number of LGTBQ+ accounts, journalists like Steven Monacelli (for stating the real name of far-right cartoonist Stonetoss), Kamala Harris support account and Tesla critic Aaron Greenspan.

18/25

X has also announced partnerships with right-wing influencers Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard, both rooting for Trump in the 2024 US elections. X also announced partnership with Don Lemon, but this deal was quickly cancelled after Lemon challenged Elon during an interview.
19/25

Previously, Musk has accused Twitter of political bias, but now he’s doing this exact same thing with X. His endorsement of Trump has boosted this bias to overdrive, and today it’s difficult to tell him apart from the other ridiculous MAGA Republican propagandists.

20/25

The most blatant propaganda product from him was the “conversation” on X with Donald Trump. Riddled with technical problems, this political ad was basically Trump praising himself and Elon nodding along, while asking the most lowball questions imaginable.

21/25

Elon also supports the basic MAGA issues like gun rights and religion in his own, strange way. In order to “own the libs”, he changed the water gun emoji back to an actual gun, and criticized the Olympics opening ceremony for being “extremely disrespectful to Christians”.

22/25

During the early days of the full-scale Russo-Ukrainian War, Elon seemed to be strongly supporting the Ukrainian effort. But slowly, he seems to have started agreeing with his old friends and Trump supporters like David Sacks and The Heritage Foundation boys.

23/25

Musk has gone a long way from the guy promoting Tesla’s “LGBTQ equality score” on Twitter to being a hardcore right-winger supporting most authoritarian regimes around the world and calling the US Democrats politics “communism” (and somehow claiming to be “the resistance”).
24/25

For many, Musk pledging to donate 45 million USD per month to Trump’s presidential campaign (and later backtracking) was big news. To me, the more worrying thing is that Elon has adjusted a massive social media platform to benefit Trump and his supporters.

25/25

My book titled “Vatnik Soup - The Ultimate Guide to Russian Disinformation” will be published on 20 September 2024, you can now pre-order it from here (comes with extra goodies!):
kleart.dk/webshop/p/vatn…

The first Elon Musk #vatniksoup can be found here:

https://x.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/1672940669978001410

And the second part, which focuses more on the Russo-Ukrainian War, can be found here:

https://x.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/1674360288445964288