Elon Musk's latest Twitter tantrum is an attempt to amplify propaganda

[marmar]

Elon Musk's latest Twitter tantrum is an attempt to amplify propaganda
The "shadowbanning" myth is a pretext to boost far-right voices on social media — even if people don't follow them

By AMANDA MARCOTTE
Senior Writer
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 14, 2023 6:13AM (EST)


(Salon) The cartoonish villainy of Tesla CEO Elon Musk leveled up again last week after he fired an engineer for the high crime of telling him the truth.

Musk, whose social media addiction clearly motivated the otherwise baffling decision to waste billions of dollars buying Twitter, was mad that his personal account wasn't getting more likes and retweets. The obvious reason for this is that Musk's tweets are boring. They're often sub-replacement-level right-wing trolling or failed attempts at humor. It's not a surprise that, once the furor over Musk buying Twitter subsided, so did attention to his dumb tweets. He's just not that interesting to people who aren't being paid to pretend to like him.

Musk didn't want to hear that truth, however. So instead, he fired the engineer, as it's still technically illegal even for billionaires to pull a Darth Vader and murder henchmen who dare say true things to them. For this, Musk got rightly and roundly mocked on his own platform for being a big old baby.

While Musk's ego is a big factor in his insistence that his unpopularity must be a conspiracy against him, his tantrum is part of a larger Republican strategy of using false accusations of social media "bias" against the right as leverage to pressure the companies into disseminating even more right-wing propaganda — often to people who didn't ask for it. The goal is to create the illusion that far-right ideas are more popular than they actually are, helping normalize and mainstream the MAGA movement's war on democracy.

It's the same "working the referees" tactic that has long worked to tilt the mainstream media into a pro-Republican bias that often veers into outright disinformation. For decades, Republicans have used false claims of "liberal bias" to bully journalists into minimizing negative coverage of the right, while elevating often baseless stories about the left. It's how a nonsense story about Hillary Clinton's emails ended up dominating 2016 election coverage, while genuinely troubling stories about Donald Trump's long history of crime, from sexual assault to tax fraud, received only a fraction of the coverage. It's why the media currently conflates a real scandal regarding Donald Trump stealing and hiding classified documents with a nothingburger about President Joe Biden turning over accidentally filed documents without a fuss. .............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2023/02/14/elon-musks-latest-twitter-tantrum-is-an-attempt-to-amplify-propaganda/

[yardwork]

1. Good article. Maybe the media can be shamed into waking up.

[2naSalit]

2. Seems he takes tips from rupert.