Despite Rogan’s assertions otherwise, there are dozens of tangible and recent examples of Musk’s conservative shift. Just ahead of last year’s midterm elections, he told Twitter users that they should vote Republican (after sharing a Nazi meme). Musk later advocated for Kevin McCarthy to become Speaker of the House. And during a recent trip to Capitol Hill, he only scheduled meetings with Republicans—and wished McCarthy a happy birthday—while ignoring congressional Democrats. Prior to his get-out-the-vote message, meanwhile, he spread a baseless conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi’s attack that originated in far-right circles. The billionaire edge lord has also openly embraced MAGA tropes, such as whining about the “woke mind virus” and mockingly joking that his preferred pronouns are “Prosecute/Fauci.” (That is, when he’s not tweaking the Twitter algorithm to artificially juice his own engagement and flood users’ feeds with his tweets.) Additionally, Republicans have expressed their ever-growing admiration for the tech giant, going so far as to openly “thank God” that he bought Twitter. Some GOP lawmakers, even as they investigate “government interference” and its “weaponization” of social media, have boasted about talking company strategy with Musk.

Joe Rogan Can’t Figure Out Why People Think Elon Musk Is a ‘Right-Winger’ Now

All TERF's are just right-wing fascists and can go die actually.

Twitter is protecting Nazis again. My alt account was just suspended because I had the audacity to say they should've punched the Nazi harder

Every single transphobic shitstain I saw today is fine, though

Musk reactivated the accounts of Brazilian far-right politicians Carla Zambelli, Gustavo Gayer, and Nikolas Ferreira. Ferreira, a Bolsonaro supporter, openly questioned the security of Brazil’s electronic voting machines, even though he won his local legislative race.

“All of these names have been problematic for years on social media,” says Flora Rebello Arduini, campaign director at the nonprofit advocacy organization Ekō. “They've been pushing for the far-right and election misinformation for ages.”

When Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, later renaming it X, many activists in Brazil worried that he would abuse the platform to push his own agenda, Arduini says. “He has unprecedented broadcasting abilities. He is bullying a supreme court justice of a democratic country, and he is showing he will use all the resources he has available to push for whatever favors his personal opinions or his professional ambitions.”

Under Musk, X has become a haven for the far right and disinformation. After taking over, Musk offered amnesty to users who had been banned from the platform, including right-wing influencer Andrew Tate, who, along with his brother, was indicted in Romania on several charges including with rape and human trafficking in June 2023 (he has denied the allegations). Last month, one of Tate's representatives told the BBC that "they categorically reject all charges."

A 2023 study found that hate speech has increased on the platform under Musk’s leadership. The situation in Brazil is just the latest instance of Musk aligning himself with and platforming dangerous, far-right movements around the world, experts tell WIRED. "It's not about Twitter or Brazil. It's about a strategy from the global far right to overcome democracies and democratic institutions around the world," says Nina Santos, a digital democracy researcher at the Brazilian National Institute of Science & Technology who researches the Brazilian far right. “An opinion from an American billionaire should not count more than a democratic institution.”

This also comes as Brazil has continued working to understand and investigate the lead-up to January 8, 2023, when election-denying insurrectionists who refused to accept right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat stormed Brazil’s legislature. The TSE, the country’s election court, is a special judicial body that investigates electoral crimes and is part of the mechanism for overseeing the country’s electoral processes overall. The court has been investigating the dissemination of fake news and disinformation that cast doubt on the country’s elections in the months and years leading up to the storming of the legislature on January 8, 2023. Both Arduini and Santos believe that the accounts Musk is refusing to remove are likely connected to the court’s inquiry.

“A life-and-death struggle recently took place in Brazil for the democratic rule of law and against a coup d'état, which is under investigation by this court in compliance with due legal process,” Luís Roberto Barroso, the president of the federal supreme court, said in a statement about Musk’s comments. “Nonconformity against the prevalence of democracy continues to manifest itself in the criminal exploitation of social networks.”

Santos also worries that Musk is setting a precedent that the far right will be protected and promoted on his platform, regardless of local laws or public opinion. “They are trying to use Brazil as a laboratory on how to interfere in local politics and local businesses,” she says. “They are making the case that their decision is more important than the national decision from a state democratic institution.”

Though Musk has claimed to be a free-speech advocate, and X’s public statement on the takedowns asserts that Brazilians are entitled to free speech, the platform’s application of these principles has been uneven at best. In February, on order of the Indian government, X blocked the accounts Hindutva Watch and the India Hate Lab in India, two US-based nonprofits that track incidents of religiously motivated violence perpetrated by supporters of the country’s right-wing government. A 2023 study from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard found that X complied with more government takedown requests under Musk’s leadership than it had previously.

In March, X blocked the accounts of several prominent researchers and journalists after they identified a well-known neo-Nazi cartoonist, later changing its own terms of service to justify the decision.

—Elon Musk Is Platforming Far-Right Activists in Brazil

❌: eggman is elon musk

✅: eggman is walt disney

I can't even put into words how fucked up this is

So beyond frustrating to see the term "antisemitism" co-opted to manufacture consent and stifle dissent for the genocide of Palestinians, all while real antisemitism carries no consequence whatsoever for the many, many American celebrities and billionaires who peddle it. Deeply radicalizing to watch Palestinian-Americans demonized for protesting the genocide of their people, to watch scores of anti-zionist Jews arrested for standing with Palestine, only for genuinely antisemitic voices to be propped up and bolstered because "censorship is bad" and "they have a point."

Elon Musk and Nelson Peltz Embrace Publicly Just Days Ahead of Disney's Next Earnings Call; Musk Hints He Might Acquire Disney - That Park Place

"Elon Musk and Nelson Peltz Embrace Publicly Just Days Ahead of Disney’s Next Earnings Call; Musk Hints He Might Acquire Disney

Published On: February 4, 2024

Bob Iger might want to order more ulcer medication. The richest man in the world, who had choice words for the Disney CEO at a New York Times summit, was just publicly embracing the man waging a proxy war for control of The Walt Disney Company."

It's as bad as I thought. Norman Peltz, CEO at Wendys is very close to Elon Musk, who's troll filled platform has gone after Disney, for years, for Warner Bros Pictures and other studios, hurting their promos and movies. Its been everything from embedding spying actors and actresses to activist directors, deliberately screwing up scripts.

And don't forget his ass dressing as Baphomet, a Demon.

Norman Peltz is a hard Rightwinger, no doubt. He's a slash and burn type. They want to destroy Disney or definitely have access to Children and those programs, which I hope, nobody else wants to happen. Is he helping the Brits, too? Well shit. Look who his family married into. I know Disney is far from perfect. But the company HAS been under attack, and mostly by people, like Musk who aren't even American.

MUSK HAS ALSO BEEN DIRECTLY INVOLVED WITH TRAFFICKERS. All the Bro mouthpieces, on YouTube, like Clownfish TV, Mr H Reviews, etc...are likely working for him and by doing so, resulting in an action that will lead to children being hurt!

Now with a brain chip you can be tracked via satellite by a federally bankrolled chauvinistic billionaire fascist.

Enjoy.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/neuralink-implants-brain-chip-first-human-musk-says-2024-01-29/

In the last 15 years or so Twitter has sort of become the de-facto gathering place for interaction on the internet. It’s messy and it was never very profitable, but it had a lot of value2 , and, while a lot of very smart and dedicated people worked at Twitter to harness that value and enhance it and foster the environment from which that value sprang, that value was created not by the owners or the developers, but by the fact that interesting and smart and funny people interacted there, and by the interesting or provocative or educational or funny things they said. Now, the world’s smartest man had already been on Twitter before he bought it, and it soon became evident that being the world’s smartest man meant you came off in a certain way that doesn’t seem particularly smart, especially to people who aren’t the world’s smartest man. For example, being the world’s smartest man meant finding things funny that were sort of lowest-common denominator stuff, or played-out jokes, or memes from months or years ago. And it also meant finding memes and jokes that other people had created and passing them off as his own. And it also seemed to mean trying to advise the expert rescue team during the Tham Luong cave rescue with grandiose plans, and then, after being told by the leader of that team that his suggestions were both unwelcome and as unpractical as most of his plans, lashing out and calling their leader a “pedo guy” and a “child rapist.” And then after he bought Twitter, we have all seen what it means. It means insisting on fostering a place for unrestricted free speech while banning reporters who are critical of him, and bringing back the sorts of abusive actors who had been banned for using their hate speech to threaten and harass other people off the platform. It means insisting that the platform should be unbiased while currying favor from far-right extremists and propogandists and even doing their bidding in real time. It means creating a subscription model that demolishes the existing verification structure and claiming that doing so will create a level playing field, even while describing the new playing field as a deeply divided hierarchy based not on value of one’s thoughts, but on one’s willingness to pay. It means firing most of the staff and pulling apart various load-bearing aspects of the platform’s framework and replacing it with a post-it note. It means doing a lot of things that destroy the value of the platform, in other words, which make more and more of the people who gather on Twitter and create its value wonder what the point of continuing to write on Twitter is.

The World's Smartest Man Doesn't Want You to Read This on Twitter

….trump is back on twitter. tampon boy needs to kick his oxygen habit to restore balance.

Nothing to see here just national security threat and all-around ahole, Elon Musk forcing the Auschwitz Memorial to wear his fascist Twitter blue checkmark badge against their will. 

Saw a conservative anti-trans ad on my Twitter and finally decided to deactivate it.

I’m in a rage.

Trans rights are human rights.

LGBTQ+ people are worth more than any app or subscription.

And Elon musk is worthless.

As if Mondays weren’t bad enough, Elon Musk shared a photo of a Nazi soldier and then encouraged “independent-minded voters” to follow his lead and vote Republican in the midterm elections.

The Tesla founder posted a photo of a Nazi soldier with a crate of carrier pigeons on his back, with an unread notifications badge photoshopped onto the cage.

If Musk was looking for a photo of carrier pigeons to make a point about his new role as CEO of Twitter, he didn’t have to pick one of a Nazi soldier.

Less than an hour later, he tweeted a message to “independent-minded voters”:

Despite promising that Twitter would not become a “free-for-all hellscape” under his rule, the platform is already devolving into chaos, with Musk seemingly leading the charge.

Musk is entering his third week of ownership, and already, Twitter has been awash with hate speech. The social media research group National Contagion Research Institute said that in the 12 hours since Musk bought Twitter, use of the n-word increased almost 500%.

The self-described “free speech absolutist”—except, apparently, when it comes to jokes at his expense—has promised to roll back content moderation on Twitter. He has shared conspiracy theories about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband and allowed election deniers back on the platform.

His decisions have led advertisers to leave Twitter in droves. Musk complained they were being pressured by activists, but his claim was community fact-checked as Twitter users said it lacked context.

“I will say that if you’re trying to assuage the fears of the advertisers fleeing the platform you just [spent] billions on, you might want to have someone on your payroll spend five seconds looking at whether a meme you’re about to post has any link to the Nazis,” tweeted writer and QAnon expert Mike Rothschild. “But that’s just me.”