From ‘Social Media Better Not Touch Politics’ To ‘Social Media Must Push One Sided Nonsense’

As we head into next week’s election, it is worth taking a step back and realizing how absolutely ridiculous it is that we spent five or six years with people insisting that Facebook and Twitter absolutely needed to be punished for supposedly engaging in biased content moderation (something they did not do).

While any private media entity has a First Amendment right to use its editorial discretion however it wants, including in a biased way, we were subject to years of freakouts from (usually) Republican politicians and supporters about how social media moderation was clearly illegal election interference.

Remember, we had to sit through multiple hours-long hearings in which Republicans screamed at tech company CEOs about their apparent “bias” in how they ran their companies, despite no actual bias being evident. Hell, the GOP is still engaged in a lawsuit claiming that Gmail’s spam filter is illegally biased against them (it’s not) and somehow that’s election interference (it’s not).

Even more ridiculous, even Mark Zuckerberg’s totally non-partisan attempt to donate to groups working on making sure elections were safe and fair was turned into a giant conspiracy theory claiming he was abusing his wealth to elect Biden (again something multiple studies — not to mention common sense — showed was not at all true). It got so ridiculous that Zuckerberg felt the need to cower before Jim Jordan and apologize, despite doing nothing wrong.

At the same time, we had Congressional hearings (sometimes the same ones!) in which Democrats demanded tech CEOs explain how they were dealing with “election misinformation.” This led to various companies setting up “election integrity” teams who tried to do good work… until Jim Jordan pretended that even the actions of having election officials alert social media companies to people impersonating election officials, or pushing voter-themed phishing scams, was election interference.

Of course, all of this is just background to the fact that, today, at this moment, Elon Musk is doing way more to swing the election to Trump than what the GOP falsely imagined big tech companies were doing in the past to help Biden.

And… we hear crickets.

I don’t expect that the modern GOP would call out this hypocrisy. After all, the driving principle behind the modern GOP is “everything anyone who is not a MAGA Trumpist does should be considered against the law, and everything MAGA folks do is perfectly fine.”

But, shouldn’t someone be calling it out?

Over at the Atlantic, Charlie Warzel has the latest example of extreme nonsense happening now on ExTwitter. Rather than Election Integrity, Musk appears to be using his control of the platform to further ridiculous, nonsensical, election conspiracy theories and propaganda.

Nothing better encapsulates X’s ability to sow informational chaos than the Election Integrity Community—a feed on the platform where users are instructed to subscribe and “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” The community, which was launched last week by Musk’s America PAC, has more than 34,000 members; roughly 20,000 have joined since Musk promoted the feed last night. It is jammed with examples of terrified speculation and clearly false rumors about fraud. Its top post yesterday morning was a long rant from a “Q Patriot.” His complaint was that when he went to vote early in Philadelphia, election workers directed him to fill out a mail-in ballot and place it in a secure drop box, a process he described as “VERY SKETCHY!” But this is, in fact, just how things work: Pennsylvania’s early-voting system functions via on-demand mail-in ballots, which are filled in at polling locations. The Q Patriot’s post, which has been viewed more than 62,000 times, is representative of the type of fearmongering present in the feed and a sterling example of a phenomenon recently articulated by the technology writer Mike Masnick, where “everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t bother to educate yourself.”

Elsewhere in the Election Integrity Community, users have reposted debunked theories from 2020 about voting machines switching votes, while others are sharing old claims of voter fraud from past local elections. Since Musk promoted the feed last night, it has become an efficient instrument for incitement and harassment; more users are posting about individual election workers, sometimes singling them out by name. In many instances, users will share a video, purportedly from a polling location, while asking questions like “Is this real?” This morning, the community accused a man in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, of stealing ballots. Popular right-wing influencers such as Alex Jones amplified the claim, but their suspect turned out to be the county’s postmaster, simply doing his job.

The most important feature of the Election Integrity Community is the sheer volume of posts: dozens per hour, such that scrolling through them becomes overwhelming. It presents the viewer with fragmented pieces of information—more than any casual news consumer (or most election offices, for that matter) might be able to confirm or debunk. And so the feed is the purest distillation of what Musk’s platform wishes to accomplish. He has created a bullshit machine.

It’s not new that Musk has built himself a snowglobe of confirmation bias. We know that’s true. It’s somewhat ironic that he’s now doing so under the name “Election Integrity,” which was the very function forced upon social media companies in the hopes that private companies would magically protect our elections against malicious interference attempts.

But at least someone should be calling out the blatant hypocrisy. All of the non-Musk tech execs spent years being raked over the coals for completely hallucinated concerns about “bias.” And here is Musk not just turning ExTwitter into a full time pro-Trump propaganda engine, but the very same people who screamed about (non-existent) “election interference” from those other companies are somehow cheering Musk on.

Remember the whole “Google is engaging in election interference because Gmail puts more GOP emails in spam” thing? The study they based that on didn’t really show any indication of bias. First off, it found the reverse in Outlook and YahooMail (more Dem emails went to spam, but somehow no one ever mentions that). Also, as the authors of the study explained, the entire “effect” in Gmail went away if someone made any attempt to “train” their spam filter. This was a complete nothingburger, and yet the GOP is still trying to make a big deal of it.

Or, hell, just last week, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (who has shown himself willing to push all sorts of censorial, partisan bullshit) “launched an investigation” into Google, claiming that it puts pro-Trump results further down in search rankings.

Yet, where is Bailey’s investigation into this?

This algorithmic prioritization represents the second prong of the approach: granting far-right influencers and the MAGA faithful greater reach with their posts. A Washington Post analysis of lawmaker tweets from July 2023 to the present day show that Republican officials’ posts go viral far more often than Democrats’ do, and that Musk’s right-wing political activism has encouraged Republican lawmakers to post more, too, “allowing them to greatly outnumber Democrats on users’ feeds.” According to the Post, “Republicans’ tweets totaled more than 7.5 billion views since July 2023—more than double the Democrats’ 3.3 billion.” Musk has effectively turned the platform into a far-right social network and echo chamber, not unlike Rumble and Truth Social. The difference, of course, is X’s size and audience, which still contains many prominent influencers, celebrities, athletes, and media members.

No such investigation is forthcoming. Indeed, Bailey regularly cheers on Musk for doing this kind of thing.

So here I am, shouting into the wind. What Musk is doing may be legal. But so was what every other company was doing in the past (which wasn’t even biased in the first place). It’s not just the hypocrisy that is so ridiculous. It’s the fact that they continue to insist that companies are doing “illegal” things that are biased against them when (1) that’s not happening and (2) they’re doing way more biased things on behalf of Trump.

In the end, sticking with the GOP credo, their issue was never actually about bias or “election interference.” It was always about “wait, why aren’t we engaging in this kind of thing?”

I know it doesn’t matter. Trump fans will make up reasons this is “different” (and it is, because this is actually happening as opposed to the other stuff they claimed, which wasn’t), but it does feel that someone should call out this hypocrisy.