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 as 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 percent.
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.”
