Elon Musk and the danger to democracy
With nearly 195mn followers, he is America’s most influential purveyor of disinformation. In total he has made 50 posts since January 1 that have been debunked by independent fact checkers, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. These were viewed 1.2bn times. They included a deep fake video that purportedly showed Kamala Harris calling herself “the ultimate diversity hire”.
In the last few days, he has commented repeatedly on the racist riots in Britain. He has forecast a coming UK civil war, condemned Britain’s prime minister Sir Keir Starmer for alleged bias towards non-whites and implied that Britain’s immigration policies were responsible for the murder of three girls last week in Southport. Posts by figures who were banned under Twitter’s previous ownership, such as Tommy Robinson, a fringe and four-times-jailed extreme right British activist, have gone viral.
On Thursday, Musk promoted another far right British figure — Ashlea Simon, co-founder of Britain First, also a white supremacist splinter group — who claimed Starmer planned to send British rioters to detention camps in the Falkland Islands. Simon’s post cited a fake Daily Telegraph story carrying that headline, a story the Telegraph quickly pointed out was invented. Musk deleted his tweet but only after it had made about 2mn impressions and with no apology for his error.
The difference between X and say the right-leaning GB News in the UK, or whatever platform the far-right radio host Alex Jones is using in America, is that the latter two are siloed channels. X claims to be the public square. In some respects, people are right to point out that “Twitter is not real life”. It isn’t. But when racist thugs falsely learn on X that refugees are child killers then gather to burn down refugee hostels — the site becomes all too real. At critical moments, X has become a key vector for potentially lethal untrue assertions. That its owner would endorse some of them ought to be a matter of public interest.
https://www.ft.com/content/bdd100a8-4817...a760aaebf1
With nearly 195mn followers, he is America’s most influential purveyor of disinformation. In total he has made 50 posts since January 1 that have been debunked by independent fact checkers, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. These were viewed 1.2bn times. They included a deep fake video that purportedly showed Kamala Harris calling herself “the ultimate diversity hire”.
In the last few days, he has commented repeatedly on the racist riots in Britain. He has forecast a coming UK civil war, condemned Britain’s prime minister Sir Keir Starmer for alleged bias towards non-whites and implied that Britain’s immigration policies were responsible for the murder of three girls last week in Southport. Posts by figures who were banned under Twitter’s previous ownership, such as Tommy Robinson, a fringe and four-times-jailed extreme right British activist, have gone viral.
On Thursday, Musk promoted another far right British figure — Ashlea Simon, co-founder of Britain First, also a white supremacist splinter group — who claimed Starmer planned to send British rioters to detention camps in the Falkland Islands. Simon’s post cited a fake Daily Telegraph story carrying that headline, a story the Telegraph quickly pointed out was invented. Musk deleted his tweet but only after it had made about 2mn impressions and with no apology for his error.
The difference between X and say the right-leaning GB News in the UK, or whatever platform the far-right radio host Alex Jones is using in America, is that the latter two are siloed channels. X claims to be the public square. In some respects, people are right to point out that “Twitter is not real life”. It isn’t. But when racist thugs falsely learn on X that refugees are child killers then gather to burn down refugee hostels — the site becomes all too real. At critical moments, X has become a key vector for potentially lethal untrue assertions. That its owner would endorse some of them ought to be a matter of public interest.
https://www.ft.com/content/bdd100a8-4817...a760aaebf1
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
