A few weeks after sealing the deal to buy Twitter last year, Elon Musk lamented about his view that the company favoured one side of politics.
“Twitter obv has a strong left wing bias,” he tweeted.
Almost a year to the day later, the one-time richest man in the world hosted a softball interview on a malfunctioning Twitter Space with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who officially announced that he was running for the 2024 Republican nomination for United States president.
This move is more evidence that Musk wasn’t opposed to an influential tech platform being partisan (at least, in his eyes). Almost every decision made since then has shown that Musk’s real grievance was that the company didn’t reflect his specific, right-wing world view.
Musk’s own beliefs have been apparent for a long time. While publications like The New York Times paid lip service to his claims that he’s not a conservative, Musk’s staunch anti-regulation and anti-union stances, flirtation with COVID-19 denialism and anti-vaccine rhetoric, obsession about the “woke mind virus” and cancel culture, and interest in the culture war over gender (despite his own daughter being transgender) all place him comfortably on the Republican side of the ledger. That he owns an electric car company that has received a healthy amount of support from government has just become an ideological quirk.
It’s one thing to hold political views, but what’s significant is that Musk’s beliefs are undeniably shaping Twitter in his own image. Musk’s choice to host — technically but also literally — a main right-wing candidate’s run for president is just the latest thing he’s done to turn the platform into Fox News, only for people who know how to use a smartphone.
There’s more. Dumped Fox host Tucker Carlson is launching a Twitter show. Ben Shapiro’s conservative media network The Daily Wire will now put all its content natively on the platform. Right-wing figures have rushed back to the platform after a mass unbanning of accounts and the removal of protections against COVID-19 misinformation and for transgender users. Twitter’s privatisation of its “blue tick” verification program has elevated white nationalists while demoting notable figures. Emergency services have abandoned the platform after the company started charging $42,000 a month for a formerly free API program that allowed them to automate warnings.
Under Musk’s regime, Twitter has been plagued by outages, conspiracy theories and hate speech. But, responding to reporting about the platform’s decline this morning, the billionaire was unrepentant.
“???? Untamed Free Speech FTW ????,” he tweeted.
