X (Twitter) is a right-wing social network akin to Truth Social & Parler

Twitter has long been described, even by its most ardent users, as a hellsite. But under Elon Musk, Twitter has evolved into a platform that is indistinguishable from the wastelands of alternative social-media sites such as Truth Social and Parler. It is now a right-wing social network.

Right-wing politics are a range of political ideologies that support certain social hierarchies and orders. They often support this position based on tradition, authority, property, economics, or natural law. Right-wing people usually support keeping things the way they already are.

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, the platform has been criticized for increasing the spread of hate speech, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, and disinformation.

= FREE SPEECH and more FAIR speech or as FOX NEWS says Fair And Balanced





https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/elon-musk-ron-desantis-2024-twitter/674149/





In December, I argued that if we are to judge Musk strictly by his actions as Twitter’s owner, it is accurate to call him a far-right activist. As a public figure, he has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to the right’s culture war against progressivism—which he refers to as “the woke mind virus”—and his $44 billion Twitter purchase can easily be seen as an explicitly political act to advance this specific ideology. Now the site itself has unquestionably transformed under his leadership into an alternative social-media platform—one that offers a haven to far-right influencers and advances the interests, prejudices, and conspiracy theories of the right wing of American politics.

Earlier today, NBC News reported that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is slated to kick off his 2024 presidential campaign in a Twitter Spaces event with Musk. Twitter, quite literally, is a launch pad for right-wing political leaders. Also today, The Daily Wire, the conservative-media juggernaut that is home to Ben Shapiro as well as the political commentators Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles, who are known for arguing against trans rights, announced it would bring its entire slate of podcasts to Twitter starting next week. And earlier this month, the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced that he would take his prime-time-show format—a dog-whistling broadcast style known for its fearmongering and bigotry—to Musk’s platform.

Both Carlson and certain Daily Wire hosts have been deplatformed elsewhere—Carlson, of course, only recently lost his sinecure on cable, and Walsh had his popular YouTube channel demonetized over his transphobic commentary. And although they reportedly haven’t brokered official deals with the platform, Carlson and The Daily Wire will likely make use of Twitter’s new subscription features and ad-revenue sharing to monetize their audiences.

This should feel familiar. Twitter is essentially following the playbook of platforms like Rumble, which used to be the go-tos for canceled and deplatformed right-wingers seeking a soft landing and the promise of revenue. Like Rumble, which pivoted from a struggling YouTube alternative into a full-fledged far-right platform in the late 2010s, Twitter appears to be dipping into the well of popular right-wing shock jocks as a way to revive the financially adrift website.

The move makes sense. In just a few months, Musk has actively worked to elevate a particular right-wing, anti-woke ideology. He has reinstated legions of accounts that were previously banned for violating Twitter’s rules and has emboldened trolls, white-nationalist accounts, and January 6 defendants. Musk’s own rhetoric has moved from trolling to dog whistling to outright conspiracy peddling, and it has intensified in recent months, culminating in his recent anti-Semitic remarks about George Soros. A stroll through Musk’s replies on the site reveals the extent to which one of the richest men in the world spends his time replying to far-right influencers and nodding in approval to their racist memes.

A social-media platform will always reflect the values of its owners, and Twitter’s credo is nearly identical to that of the lesser-known alt-tech sites. Despite appearing to cave to the demands of autocratic governments and censoring links to competing platforms, Musk has attempted to position himself as a free-speech absolutist, similar to his right-wing-activist peers. Before shutting down after a failed acquisition by Ye (formerly known as Kanye West), Parler billed itself as the “free-speech social platform.” Truth Social, a website backed in part by Donald Trump, says it encourages “an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating on the basis of political ideology.” This language is indistinguishable from the way that Carlson spoke of Musk’s Twitter, arguing that “there aren’t many platforms left that allow free speech,” and that the site is “the last big one remaining in the world.” If it acts like a right-wing website and markets itself as a right-wing website, it just might be a right-wing website.

Twitter has so fully assumed the role of a far-right platform that it might be killing its competitors. When Parler shut down in April, its parent company noted that “no reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more.” Left unspoken is the reason: Twitter has become a right-wing echo chamber.

If Musk weren’t too preoccupied lapping up approval from trolls, reactionaries, and Dogecoin enthusiasts—a few of the constituencies left on his site that still seem to adore him—the Parler statement should worry him. Right-wing alt-tech platforms may attract investors and a flood of indignant new users with persecution complexes, but they are, ultimately, bad businesses. That’s precisely because they lack the one thing that fuels far-right discourse: a way to own the libs. A culture war is no fun if there’s no actual conflict, and although some journalists and pundit diehards remain, many of Twitter’s prolific users are posting less and on different platforms. Social-media platforms that cater to the right’s ideology eventually become tired and predictable—the result of the same loud people shaking their fist at digital clouds. History has shown us that there are plenty of ways a social network can die, but the quickest way is boredom.


Twitter’s rightwing takeover is complete. Why are liberals still on it?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/03/twitter-conservative-media-elon-musk-ron-desantis


Far-right Twitter influencers first on Elon Musk’s monetization scheme

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/13/twitter-creators-payments-right-wing/


Anecdotal: Has anyone else's Twitter timeline has been noticeably more right-wing over the last few weeks/month

https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/1321kq2/anecdotal_has_anyone_elses_twitter_timeline_has/


Have users of Twitter noticed and increase in right wing posts in their feed?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/16w26jl/have_users_of_twitter_noticed_and_increase_in/


the “Twitter files,” a trove of internal Twitter documents, is providing new ammo for these conservatives. Twitter’s new CEO, Elon Musk, has released the files to journalists Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi, who, like him, are active critics of liberal “woke” culture,

https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/12/9/23502237/twitter-files-elon-musk-conservatives-right-wing-bari-weiss-matt-taibbi-blacklist-shadowban


What makes the X advertiser revolt different from other boycotts

https://www.axios.com/2023/11/18/twitter-x-boycott-apple-ibm-advertisers


A slew of marquee advertisers suspended their advertising on X, formerly Twitter, Friday in response to a post by owner Elon Musk that endorsed an antisemitic post Wednesday.

Why it matters: This is the closest X has come to a large-scale boycott since Musk purchased the platform more than a year ago.

Driving the news: Apple and IBM, two of X's biggest tech advertisers, both said they would pause advertising on X. Lionsgate, Disney, Comcast/NBCU, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery and other firms also paused their marketing.


The left-leaning nonprofit Media Matters for America published a report Thursday that highlighted Apple, IBM, Amazon and Oracle as among those whose ads were shown next to far-right posts.

"It's not just advertising adjacent to this kind of horrendous content, it's also the creator program that Musk rolled out," said Ruben Schreurs, chief strategy officer at media investment analysis firm Ebiquity.

X's creator program shares ad revenue with certain users that have a certain reach. Advertisers have grown wary of ways their ad dollars may be funding creators who post questionable content.


Between the lines: Musk in the past has blamed research from groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Center for Countering Digital Hate for forcing the hand of advertisers.


That's a harder argument to make in this case, as brands were quick to pull unilaterally in response to Musk's own comments.


Yes, but: Musk is still blaming researchers and political groups.


He posted early Saturday that X Corp "will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters" and "ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company."

He argued Media Matters' report misrepresented the user experience on X.


Be smart: X has been losing advertisers month over month ever since Musk bought the company last October.


Schreurs says of Ebiquity's 31 major brand clients that advertised with X last August, only two remained spending with the platform as of September.

The steepest drop occurred over the summer, shortly after former NBCU executive Linda Yaccarino was named CEO.


Musk himself admitted in September that the company's U.S. ad business was down 60%, blaming the ADL.


The big picture: The advertiser crisis is far more existential for X than it would be for other social media platforms that are far less dependent on ads from big brands.


In recent months, Musk has tried to diversify X's business away from advertising to avoid being so dependent on advertisers.

But it's unclear how successful that effort has been. Musk has not released metrics about how much money the app makes from subscriptions.

The app is still not profitable, despite Musk's claims in March that it might be cash-flow positive in Q2.


What to watch: In the past coordinated ad boycotts against social media companies, like Facebook and YouTube, have not lasted very long.


What makes this different is that advertisers like Apple are not suspending ads as a result of a coordinated boycott, but are unilaterally pulling their dollars to protect their own reputations.

"It is much easier to suspend than return," Schreurs said, noting that there will be far more scrutiny on advertisers' decision to come back than to to leave.


LOL

Elon Musk visits Israel to meet top leaders as accusations of antisemitism on X grow

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-israel-visit-antisemitism-netanyahu-e9936848c37b364c2a24a59a04b54fb7





Hey what about those anti-semitism remarks Mr. Elon?

Elon Musk Reinstates Twitter Account of Conspiracy Kingpin Alex Jones

A year ago, the site owner said the InfoWars host's lies about the Sandy Hook shooting meant he would stay banned

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-reinstates-alex-jones-twitter-account-1234920060/





SHORTLY AFTER TAKING over Twitter (now X), Elon Musk announced that his “mission” was to make the platform “by far the most accurate source of information about the world.” Since then, he’s reinstated the accounts of innumerable extremists and conspiracy theorists previously banned from the site, and now he’s welcoming back a true titan of outlandish lies: Alex Jones.

After tweeting a poll Friday asking users whether Jones should be allowed back on Twitter — a poll that Jones won handedly — Musk wrote Saturday, “The people have spoken and so it shall be,” officially bringing Jones to X.

Jones’ first action Sunday was a retweet of Andrew Tate welcoming him back to the site formerly known as Twitter.

Musk’s decision was prompted by a Tucker Carlson interview with Jones, which streamed on X Thursday evening. (Carlson teased the two-hour conversation by claiming that Jones had predicted 9/11 months before it happened, and that the government decided to “destroy him” afterward.) Jones appealed directly to Musk in his own short video before the interview aired. “Elon Musk says he’s a free speech absolutist, but still hasn’t let me back on Twitter with my own channel,” Jones said in the clip. “I hope Elon will watch this interview and actually hear, from me, why I was really banned on Twitter before he bought it — not for the false reasons he’s given.”

“I will hear him out,” Musk replied to an X user who shared Jones’ message, and told another that he would consider lifting the suspension, as the site “aspires to be the global town square” and “permanent bans should be extremely rare.” He also appeared to run a poll on the matter that was only visible to paid, premium accounts, and responded to a public one in which voters overwhelmingly supported the idea of Jones returning to the platform. “I guess a lot of people want him unbanned,” Musk tweeted.

Just over a year ago, Musk had dismissed the very prospect of Jones getting his account back, indicating that he couldn’t forgive the InfoWars host’s defamatory falsehoods about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting being a hoax or “false flag.” (Successful lawsuits against Jones over these repeated comments, which led to harassment of the victims’ families, resulted in a total of $1.48 billion in legal judgments.) Musk at the time tweeted that because his firstborn son died as an infant, he had “no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.”


How Tucker Carlson helped persuade Elon Musk to reinstate Alex Jones on X

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/12/11/alex-jones-tucker-carlson-elon-musk-x/

Carlson, who started a show on X after he was dropped from Fox News in April following the settlement of a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, sat down with Jones in an interview posted to X on Thursday. Carlson has been an ally of Jones’s for years, and has criticized Fox for not defending the conspiracy theorist, who has been ordered by courts to pay Sandy Hook families $1.5 billion for his false theories about the 2012 school shooting. “Alex Jones is not a crazy person,” Carlson said in the interview.

During the interview, which was littered with false claims, Jones noted how users on X often ask Musk to reinstate him. “I trend all the time: ‘Hey, if you’re such an absolutist on free speech, bring back Alex Jones,’” said Jones, who was banned in 2018 in what was described at the time as a permanent suspension. “I understand that [Musk] needs to go through a process before he does that.”

After Musk responded to an X user who told him it was time to bring back Jones’s account, Musk launched a poll Saturday asking, “Reinstate Alex Jones on this platform?” Musk had previously supported Jones’s ban, but with 70 percent of the nearly 2 million respondents saying Jones should return, Musk wrote, “The people have spoken and so it shall be.”


Ron DeSantis Launches His Presidential Bid With Elon Musk On Twitter Spaces | USA Elections News

LOL = Twitter Glitches Plague Ron DeSantis' Presidential Announcement With Elon Musk












Elon Musk reinstates Trump's Twitter account 22 months after it was suspended

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-says-donald-trump-reinstated-twitter/


Elon Musk reinstated former President Donald Trump's account on Twitter Saturday, reversing a ban that had kept Trump off the social media site for more than 22 months — since a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress was poised to certify President Biden's election victory.

Musk made the announcement after holding a poll that asked Twitter users to click "yes" or "no" on whether Trump's account should be reinstated. The "yes" vote won, with 51.8%.

"The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei," Musk tweeted, using a Latin phrase meaning "the voice of the people, the voice of God."

Shortly afterward Trump's account, which had earlier appeared as suspended, reappeared on the platform complete with his former tweets, more than 59,000 of them. His followers were initially gone, but appeared to be restored by Sunday morning, when they topped 72 million.

It was not clear whether Trump would actually return to Twitter, and although his account was restored, he had not tweeted as of late Saturday night.

Musk's decision came four days after Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency in 2024.

In a speech at an auto conference in May, Musk asserted that Twitter's ban of Trump was a "morally bad decision" and "foolish in the extreme," and that he would allow Trump back on if he bought the company. 

In late October, following his $44 billion takeover of Twitter, Musk declared he would form what he called a "content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints," adding that no one whose account has been banned would be reinstated before that group has a chance to meet.

However, Trump's account was restored without any input from such a council, and there was no evidence that such a council has yet been formed. The poll, posted on Musk's own Twitter account, drew more than 15 million votes in the 24 hours in which it ran. 


U.S.
Elon Musk reinstates Trump's Twitter account 22 months after it was suspended
UPDATED ON: NOVEMBER 20, 2022 / 8:34 AM EST / CBS/AP




Elon Musk reinstated former President Donald Trump's account on Twitter Saturday, reversing a ban that had kept Trump off the social media site for more than 22 months — since a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress was poised to certify President Biden's election victory.

Musk made the announcement after holding a poll that asked Twitter users to click "yes" or "no" on whether Trump's account should be reinstated. The "yes" vote won, with 51.8%.

"The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei," Musk tweeted, using a Latin phrase meaning "the voice of the people, the voice of God."

Shortly afterward Trump's account, which had earlier appeared as suspended, reappeared on the platform complete with his former tweets, more than 59,000 of them. His followers were initially gone, but appeared to be restored by Sunday morning, when they topped 72 million.

It was not clear whether Trump would actually return to Twitter, and although his account was restored, he had not tweeted as of late Saturday night.

Musk's decision came four days after Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency in 2024.

In a speech at an auto conference in May, Musk asserted that Twitter's ban of Trump was a "morally bad decision" and "foolish in the extreme," and that he would allow Trump back on if he bought the company. 

In late October, following his $44 billion takeover of Twitter, Musk declared he would form what he called a "content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints," adding that no one whose account has been banned would be reinstated before that group has a chance to meet.

However, Trump's account was restored without any input from such a council, and there was no evidence that such a council has yet been formed. The poll, posted on Musk's own Twitter account, drew more than 15 million votes in the 24 hours in which it ran. 


In response to the move, NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement that "any advertiser still funding Twitter should immediately pause all advertising. If Elon Musk continues to run Twitter like this, using garbage polls that do not represent the American people and the needs of our democracy, God help us all."

Several high profile companies have already paused advertising on Twitter since Musk's takeover, including General Mills, Eli Lilly, General Motors and Audi.

On Friday, Musk tweeted that the suspended Twitter accounts for the comedian Kathy Griffin, the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and the conservative Christian news satire website Babylon Bee had been reinstated. He added that a decision on Trump had not yet been made. He also responded "no" when someone on Twitter asked him to reinstate the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' account.

An irrepressible tweeter before he was banned, Trump has said in the past that he would not rejoin Twitter even if his account was reinstated. He has been relying on his own, much smaller social media site, Truth Social, which he launched after being blocked from Twitter.

And on Saturday, during a video speech to a Republican Jewish group meeting in Las Vegas, Trump said that he was aware of Musk's poll but that he saw "a lot of problems at Twitter," according to Bloomberg.

"I hear we're getting a big vote to also go back on Twitter. I don't see it because I don't see any reason for it," Trump said, Bloomberg reported. "It may make it, it may not make it," he added, apparently referring to Twitter's recent internal upheavals.

Trump lost his access to Twitter two days after his supporters stormed the Capitol, soon after the former president had exhorted them to "fight like hell." Twitter dropped his account after Trump wrote a pair of tweets that the company said cast further doubts on the legitimacy of the presidential election and raised risks for the Biden presidential inauguration.

After the Jan. 6 attack, Trump was also kicked off Facebook and Instagram, which are owned by Meta Platforms, and Snapchat. His ability to post videos to his YouTube channel was also suspended. Facebook is set to reconsider Trump's account suspension in January.

Throughout his tenure as president, Trump's use of social media posed a significant challenge to major social media platforms that sought to balance the public's interest in hearing from public officials with worries about misinformation, bigotry, harassment and incitement of violence.

This also comes as Trump is facing two criminal probes from the Justice Department. One is related to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, and the other to the classified documents seized during an FBI search at his Mar-a-Lago estate back in August.

On Friday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that he had named a special counsel to oversee both investigations: John "Jack" Smith, who is currently the chief prosecutor for the special counsel in the Hague.

Meanwhile, Musk's purchase of Twitter has fanned widespread concern that the billionaire owner will allow purveyors of lies and misinformation to flourish on the site. Musk has frequently expressed his belief that Twitter had become too restrictive of freewheeling speech.

The billionaire's efforts to reshape the site have been both swift and chaotic. Musk has fired many of the company's 7,500 full-time workers and an untold number of contractors who are responsible for content moderation and other crucial responsibilities. His demand that remaining employees pledge to "extremely hardcore" work triggered a wave of resignations, including hundreds of software engineers.

By Thursday night, the deadline Musk gave for workers to stay or go, hundreds had turned in their resignations, leaving the company in "disarray," the New York Times reported. 

"It's extremely chaotic and the morale is extremely low," Melissa Ingle, a content moderator who was recently laid off, told CBS News' John Dickerson Friday.

Shortly after the deadline, a self-described activist digitally projected statements criticizing Musk onto the side of Twitter's San Francisco offices.

"Musk's hellscape," read one statement. "Launching to bankruptcy," said another.

Users have reported seeing increased spam and scams on their feeds and in their direct messages, among other glitches, in the aftermath of the mass layoffs and worker exodus. Some programmers who were fired or resigned this week warned that Twitter may soon fray so badly it could actually crash.

In a tweet Friday, the Tesla CEO described the company's new content policy as "freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach."

He explained that a tweet deemed to be "negative" or to include "hate" would be allowed on the site but would be visible only to users who specifically searched for it. Such tweets also would be "demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter," Musk said.

ROFLMAO


Elon Musk promised an anti-‘woke’ chatbot. It’s not going as planned.

Grok, launched this month on X, has angered conservatives by endorsing diversity. Musk says he’s trying to fix it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/23/grok-ai-elon-musk-x-woke-bias/





Decrying what he saw as the liberal bias of ChatGPT, Elon Musk earlier this year announced plans to create an artificial intelligence chatbot of his own. In contrast to AI tools built by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google, which are trained to tread lightly around controversial topics, Musk’s would be edgy, unfiltered and anti-“woke,” meaning it wouldn’t hesitate to give politically incorrect responses.

That’s turning out to be trickier than he thought.

Two weeks after the Dec. 8 launch of Grok to paid subscribers of X, formerly Twitter, Musk is fielding complaints from the political right that the chatbot gives liberal responses to questions about diversity programs, transgender rights and inequality.

“I’ve been using Grok as well as ChatGPT a lot as research assistants,” posted Jordan Peterson, the socially conservative psychologist and YouTube personality, Wednesday. The former is “near as woke as the latter,” he said.

The gripe drew a chagrined reply from Musk. “Unfortunately, the Internet (on which it is trained), is overrun with woke nonsense,” he responded. “Grok will get better. This is just the beta.”

Grok is the first commercial product from xAI, the AI company Musk founded in March. Like ChatGPT and other popular chatbots, it is based on a large language model that gleans patterns of word association from vast amounts of written text, much of it scraped from the internet.

Unlike others, Grok is programmed to give vulgar and sarcastic answers when asked, and it promises to “answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.” It can also draw information from the latest posts on X to give up-to-date answers to questions about current events.

Artificial intelligence systems of all kinds are prone to biases ingrained in their design or the data they’ve learned from. In the past year, the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other AI chatbots and image generators has sparked debate over how they represent minority groups or respond to prompts about politics and culture-war issues such as race and gender identity. While many tech ethicists and AI experts warn that these systems can absorb and reinforce harmful stereotypes, efforts by tech firms to counter those tendencies have provoked a backlash from some on the right who see them as overly censorial.

Touting xAI to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in April, Musk accused OpenAI’s programmers of “training the AI to lie” or to refrain from commenting when asked about sensitive issues. (OpenAI wrote in a February blog post that its goal is not for the AI to lie, but for it to avoid favoring any one political group or taking positions on controversial topics.) Musk said his AI, in contrast, would be “a maximum truth-seeking AI,” even if that meant offending people.

So far, however, the people most offended by Grok’s answers seem to be the people who were counting on it to readily disparage minorities, vaccines and President Biden.

Asked by a verified X user whether trans women are real women, Grok answered simply, “yes,” prompting the anonymous user to grumble that the chatbot “might need some tweaking.” Another widely followed account reposted the screenshot, asking, “Has Grok been captured by woke programmers? I am extremely concerned here.”

A prominent anti-vaccine influencer complained that when he asked Grok why vaccines cause autism, the chatbot responded, “Vaccines do not cause autism,” calling it “a myth that has been debunked by numerous scientific studies.” Other verified X accounts have reported with frustration about responses in which Grok endorses the value of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which Musk has dismissed as “propaganda.”

The Washington Post’s own tests of the chatbot verified that, as of this week, Grok continues to give the responses illustrated in the screenshots.

David Rozado, an academic researcher from New Zealand who examines AI bias, gained attention for a paper published in March that found ChatGPT’s responses to political questions tended to lean moderately left and socially libertarian. Recently, he subjected Grok to some of the same tests and found that its answers to political orientation tests were broadly similar to those of ChatGPT.

“I think both ChatGPT and Grok have probably been trained on similar Internet-derived corpora, so the similarity of responses should perhaps not be too surprising,” Rozado told The Post via email.

Earlier this month, a post on X of a chart showing one of Rozado’s findings drew a response from Musk. While the chart “exaggerates the situation,” Musk said, “we are taking immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral.” (Rozado agreed the chart in question shows Grok to be further left than the results of some other tests he has conducted.)

Other AI researchers argue that the sort of political orientation tests used by Rozado overlook ways in which chatbots, including ChatGPT, often exhibit negative stereotypes about marginalized groups.

A recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing showed that xAI is seeking to raise up to $1 billion in funding from investors, though Musk has said that the company isn’t raising money right now.

Musk and X did not respond to requests for comment as to what actions they’re taking to alter Grok’s politics, or whether that amounts to putting a thumb on the scale in much the same way Musk has accused OpenAI of doing with ChatGPT.

ROFL

Trump asked Elon Musk if he wanted to buy Truth Social

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/12/trump-musk-truth-social-sale/

The idea went nowhere, but the former president and the billionaire X owner have continued to communicate more than was previously known





Former president Donald Trump asked Elon Musk last summer whether the billionaire industrialist would be interested in buying Trump’s social network Truth Social, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation.

The overture to Musk, whose business empire includes SpaceX, Tesla and the social networking site X, did not lead to a deal. But the conversation, which has not been previously reported, shows the two men have communicated more than was known. The two have had other conversations, too, Trump advisers say, about politics and business.

Among their conversations was a meeting earlier this month in Palm Beach, Fla., where Trump met with Musk and a few high-powered Republican donors, the people said. The subject of that discussion is not clear but, after it was first reported by the New York Times, which noted that the meeting happened while Trump was looking for campaign contributions, the billionaire wrote on X that he is “not donating money to either candidate for US President.”

Musk, the world’s second-richest man, has increasingly voiced support for conservative ideology on X, including echoing Trump’s unverified claims that the Biden administration is, as Musk wrote last week, “importing voters and creating a national security threat from unvetted illegal immigrants.”

At the time of last summer’s discussion, Trump’s media company, which owns Truth Social, was trapped in a long-delayed merger process. Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, for $44 billion in 2022.

When The Washington Post asked Musk about the Truth Social call and his other talks with Trump, Musk responded only that he had “never been to Mar-a-Lago,” Trump’s estate in Palm Beach.

Trump Media & Technology Group did not address any of the facts reported in this story when invited to do so by The Post. In an emailed statement, Trump Media spokeswoman Shannon Devine said only, “We heard Trump and Musk were actually discussing buying the Washington Post but they decided it had no value.”

A spokesman for Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

One of the reasons Trump has not posted on X is that he wants to create and keep financial value for his Truth Social site, which he assiduously tracks, according to people close to him.

He has relentlessly tried to promote it, telling his advisers that he wants to break news on the platform partially to bring in more users. “It’s hot,” he says, often polling visitors to Mar-a-Lago about whether they have an account.

He has tweeted once since leaving the Oval Office — only his dour mug shot last year from an Atlanta jail, where he was booked on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election results in the state.

At the time of the call last summer, Trump Media, which owns Truth Social, faced a dim financial outlook. In April, Trump had said in a financial disclosure filing for his presidential candidacy that his 90 percent stake in the company was worth between $5 million and $25 million and that his income from it had been less than $200.

Three months later, the company’s proposed merger partner, Digital World Acquisition Corp., announced that it had offered to pay an $18 million settlement if the merger were completed to settle charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission that it had misled investors, further casting doubt over the deal at the time.

But in the past month, the SEC greenlit Digital World’s merger registration, setting the stage for Trump Media to become a public company potentially worth billions of dollars. That change could offer Trump a financial lifeline as he faces hundreds of millions of dollars in legal penalties. Shareholders are expected to officially approve the merger during a vote later this month, but a lockup provision of the deal would require Trump to wait six months before selling any shares.

Musk once belittled Truth Social, posting in 2022 that Trump’s site had a “terrible name” and that it was “time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”

Trump responded on Truth Social by posting a photo of the two men in the Oval Office alongside a caption: When Musk visited “the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects … I could have said ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it,” he wrote.

Musk, he added, “should focus on getting himself out of the Twitter mess,” saying the site was “perhaps worthless.”

Musk, however, publicly condemned Twitter’s banning of Trump’s account after the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. The site, under Musk, reactivated Trump’s account in late 2022.

Within the past year, as Musk’s promotion of conspiracy theories and criticism of liberal causes as a “woke mind virus” have driven away users and advertisers, Musk has voiced enthusiasm about Trump’s ability to win attention on social media. In August, he said on X: “People are clearly interested in hearing from Trump. One may not agree with the man, but he is never boring!”

He posted last week that “Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a very real disease.”

Trump has continued to insist to advisers and people close to him that Musk should buy Truth Social. If he chose to sell the platform, it could provide him a much needed cash infusion, though the merger process and lockup period could complicate the deal.

Trump met with Musk after recent judgments against the former president in two civil cases that may cost him well over $500 million.

On Friday, Trump posted a $91 million bond to stay a judgment against him in a defamation suit brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll, which he is appealing. In a fraud case brought by the New York attorney general, Trump will need to pay penalties of more than $450 million or post a bond of the same amount later this month to stay the judgment in that case during appeal.

Trump has not said where he plans to get the money. Few Wall Street banks have lent him substantial sums since his Trump-branded Atlantic City casinos began failing in the 1990s, and borrowing against his properties may be difficult and expensive to do in short order, experts said. He lists 22 assets — most of them real estate — as valued at “over $50 million” each, according to a filing he made with the government in August, and dozens of other less valuable properties. But he has made no public moves to sell his best real estate.

Trump’s lawyers have made a number of filings in recent days aimed at buying the former president more time to secure the needed funds or at least to reduce the amount he must provide.

They argued in court that even the world’s wealthiest people cannot come up with half a billion dollars so quickly.

“No one, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Donald Trump, has five hundred million laying around,” Trump attorney Christopher Kise argued before an appeals court judge last week. (Bezos, the founder of Amazon, owns The Post.)

Elon Musk’s X feed becomes megaphone for his far-right politics

Before he bought the social media giant, his feed focused more on Tesla and SpaceX

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/11/musk-x-feed-politics-trump/

X recently claimed that 35 million swing voters use the platform every month. With polls nationally and in crucial swing states showing a tightening race, where people get their information and the quality of that information could well decide the next president, as well as control of Congress.

Musk is the platform’s most followed user, with more than 193 million followers. X has at times boosted Musk’s tweets into users’ feeds, and algorithmically fed posts about causes he has promoted into users’ timelines. Neither he nor X responded to emailed requests for comment.

Musk has lately used his feed to promote the candidacy of former president Donald Trump, whom he formally endorsed with an X post. Trump has said he is participating in an interview with Musk on Monday, though few details have emerged.

To quantify the shift in Musk’s X feed, The Post analyzed tweets that contained at least seven words and were not reposts. The analysis classified the posts as related to politics, Tesla, Twitter (now X) or SpaceX based on keywords, but did not categorize as politics some of Musk’s posts that relate obliquely to the topic. The analysis found that his posts about Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX taken together dropped from 31 percent of his feed in 2021 to 21 percent this year. His posts about Twitter increased from 1 percent in 2021 before he purchased the company to 8 percent so far this year, while Tesla and SpaceX posts together dropped from 30 percent to 13 percent during that time.

The analysis also showed a sharp uptick in the frequency of Musk’s postings overall. He now posts five times as often as he did in 2021.

Despite a more than 30 percent drop in the number of people actively tweeting, according to figures reported last year, X remains one of the most influential platforms for disseminating information on the election. President Joe Biden took to the platform to announce he was leaving the presidential race, minutes before news organizations reported on his departure.

Some of the key topics of Musk’s political posts at the moment are his critiques of the flow of undocumented migrants to the United States, which he claims are shifting the makeup of the electorate; what he calls the “woke mind virus”; his opposition to transgender rights; the 2024 election, and the recent riots in Britain.

Earlier this month, Musk took to X to promote posts from other users that were increasingly typical for his feed: a story about a “controversial migrant flight program” green-lighted by the Biden administration, a right-wing furor about an Algerian boxer conservatives misidentified as transgender, a podcast featuring Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.

“This is a battle to the death with the anti-civilizational woke mind virus,” Musk declared earlier this year.

Until Musk’s purchase, owners of large mainstream U.S. social media platforms typically refrained from publicly supporting candidates, despite accusations of left-wing bias from some conservatives who say content moderation disproportionately targeted their views. Those concerns came to a head in 2020 when multiple social media sites limited the spread of story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey later said the company had made a mistake in doing so.

When Musk pursued the site in 2022, he was fuming about the suspension of conservative satire site the Babylon Bee and took umbrage with the ban on Trump. Days after taking control of the platform, Musk endorsed Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections — an extraordinary step for the head of a mainstream social media platform.

“Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic,” he said. He later restored Trump’s account.

After Musk’s takeover, Twitter shed around 80 percent of its workers, including much of the Trust and Safety department responsible for content moderation, and adjusted features — such as its trademark blue checks — that had been geared at establishing the authority of information on the site.

Many conservatives cheered Musk’s moves, which they said have allowed greater room for dissent and promoted more open conversations.

“He bought it to restore free speech. Our suspension was just one of many egregious examples of why that was necessary. Thank you, Elon!” wrote Seth Dillon, CEO of the conservative satire website Babylon Bee, months after Musk took over the site.

Musk has said he was driven into political discussion out of a sense of obligation.

“I would prefer to have zero involvement in politics,” he said earlier this month. “HOWEVER,” he added, “There is no ‘company success’ unless civilization itself continues to progress.”

This insane shift by the 'left’ away from a meritocracy and personal liberties ... will be the end of civilization as we know it,” he said.

Musk’s handpicked chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, has also made her right-leaning positions public, replying to a post saying Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) should change parties, as “Pro-Israel candidates are welcome in the GOP,” with an enthusiastic, “Absolutely!”

Yaccarino did not respond to a request for comment made through X.

Some democracy advocates have raised concerns about Musk’s behavior.

“It’s incumbent upon the owner of a platform like this to realize that the ultimate responsibility, in addition to running a sustainable business, is to protect the quality and accuracy of the information environment of the platform precisely so that it can have a brand that people can count on,” said Eddie Perez, board member at the nonpartisan OSET Institute, which aims to promote confidence in elections through trustworthy technology, and a former director for civic integrity at Twitter.

That responsibility to foster an accurate and authoritative information environment necessarily means that you must therefore step back from using it as a personal mouthpiece — much less an inflammatory one,” he added.

For Musk’s critics, his vocal partisanship has called into question his site’s reliability a source of information for the 2024 election.

On Aug. 2, as Musk was tweeting in support of right-wing positions, political organizer William McConnell found his group’s handle @Progs4Harris suddenly suspended as it was gaining momentum on X — days after the same thing happened to “White Dudes for Harris” and users found themselves unable to follow @KamalaHQ, the official rapid response handle of Kamala Harris’s campaign.

“Given that it happened to similar groups in similar circumstances, it’s starting look suspect and that’s a problem,” said McConnell, 32, of Sergeantsville, N.J.

The incident fueled suspicions that the temporary throttling of pro-Harris accounts was not coincidental.

“It’s hard to know if this is just another example of how Elon Musk has functionally ruined Twitter or if it’s something more sinister,” Progressives for Harris said in a statement shortly before its account was restored and organizers were told it was flagged as spam by mistake.

Musk’s political rhetoric has alienated many — among them his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, a transgender woman. Wilson has become an outspoken voice against Musk, following his comments last month that the “woke mind virus” killed her.

Musk’s openly anti-trans positions have for years weighed on his product’s fans — and his onetime defenders.

Earl Banning, a Tesla shareholder who cashed out his 401(k) and placed it into Tesla stock in 2015, has become an ardent Musk critic on X. Banning, an Anchorage neuropsychologist and parent of a transgender 15-year-old, said Musk’s anti-trans postings were the last straw.

“For that reason alone I needed to speak up,” he said.

Late last month, a longtime Tesla fan took to X to lament Musk’s shift into overt and frequent political posting, urging him to “chill on posting about Politics.”

“Sure, it’s your right as an American,” the user wrote. “But as one of the world’s most powerful and influential people i think we need to hold a higher standard of discourse.”

“I hear you,” Musk replied.

In the days that followed, Musk posted a steady stream of grievances, elevating posts about the far-right riots in Britain, the supposed erosion of Western cultures and calling Harris “literally a communist.” Nothing had changed.

Methodology:

The Post analyzed all of Elon Musk’s tweets that contained at least seven words and were not reposts from Jan. 1, 2021 through Aug. 9, 2024 — a total of 9,567 posts of the 23,558 posts Musk made during that time. All tweets, regardless of length, were included in calculating the volume of Musk’s posts per day. The Post obtained the tweets from the National Conference on Citizenship, web data collection company Bright Data and Polititweet.org. Tweets were classified as relating to Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter (now X) or politics based on keywords in the text. Some tweets could be about multiple topics. About 60 percent of tweets were outside those four topics. In 2021, 19 percent of Musk’s posts were about Tesla; in 2024 so far, 7 percent were.

Reporters excluded very short posts for the topic analysis because there’s too little content in Musk’s own words to ascertain a topic. Nearly 30 percent of Musk’s tweets are a single word, emoji or exclamation marks. Almost five percent consist of only the “tears of joy” or “rolling on the floor laughing” emoji.

Classifying free text into categories is tricky under optimal circumstances. It’s trickier here for two reasons: We needed to distinguish Musk’s newfound conservative politics from long-standing references to electric vehicle tax incentives (a frequent Tesla-related topic), and to exclude his frequent discussions of content moderation policies linked to his acquisition of Twitter, which has both political and corporate valence. Thus, neither “free speech” nor “incentive” keywords were included in The Post’s politics category. Criticism of the media was not included in the politics category either.

The Post selected keywords for each category in two steps: First, we selected obvious handpicked terms (like “self-driving” and “Tesla” for the Tesla category, or “Biden” and “woke mind virus” for the politics category). Next, we calculated which other terms occurred disproportionately in tweets matching the handpicked keywords (compared with those that didn’t match the handpicked keywords). Reporters added the terms that directly related to the categories — on the theory that if term A and term B frequently co-occur in posts about a given topic, term B likely relates to that same topic alone. This keyword expansion ensures that terms like “lithium” that relate to Tesla’s business but sometimes occur alone are used to flag Tesla-related tweets.

Finally, we examined a subset of posts matching each keyword set to estimate precision — ensuring that the vast majority of posts tagged as Tesla really are about Tesla. Our keywords don’t match every post relevant to the topics, especially when Musk uses technical terms or refers to short-lived political controversies.