How quickly do you think we’d be having Congressional hearings about “election interference” if Mark Zuckerberg so much as posted a “Harris/Walz” lawn sign in front of his house? Yet, Elon Musk is now directly tweaking the site he owns to push his favored political candidate, even seizing people’s accounts to promote Trump.
One of Elon’s main reasons (he claimed) for buying Twitter was to stop what he (falsely) believed was the existing management using the site to push their political ideology. This was never actually the case, but it did lead to things like Musk declaring this just days after the Twitter board agreed to his offer to purchase the company:
If you can’t see that, it’s Musk saying “For Twitter to deserve the public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.”
That’s not quite how things have played out. Elon has not only endorsed Donald Trump, appeared at his rallies, and turned ExTwitter into a non-stop propaganda-pushing campaign ad for Trump (while at the same time repeatedly pushing blatantly false and misleading claims via his own account), but he’s also become one of Trump’s biggest funders.
Imagine how the GOP would react if a social media CEO had done that in support of Kamala Harris?
Oh, wait, we don’t even have to imagine, because even though it hasn’t happened, the MAGA world had a fever dream where they pretended it did.
Last election, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t endorse either candidate, didn’t spend billions in support of either candidate, and didn’t turn Facebook or Instagram into campaign sites. What he did do was fund politically neutral voting infrastructure efforts to make sure the 2020 election was free and fair. And for that, he was falsely accused of election interference and tipping the scales to Biden. Donald Trump has accused Zuckerberg of criminal behavior and threatened him with jail time for that effort. And, just recently, under pressure from Rep. Jim Jordan over that funding, Zuckerberg apologized for it and promised never to help fund election infrastructure again.
Again, he did nothing partisan at all. Yet, now, Elon has turned his entire (dwindling) platform into a pro-Trump campaign site. And not a peep from anyone who complained about Zuckerberg’s voting infrastructure spending.
Now, making matters even worse, Elon has seized a username from another account, not for anything officially related to ExTwitter, but to help promote Donald Trump even more.
ExTwitter is his site, and he has the right to take anyone’s handle if he so desires. He’s done it before, though historically it has been for things ExTwitter related. The most notable example is when he took the @X handle from Gene X. Hwang.
But over the weekend, reporter Matt Binder discovered that Elon had swiped the account of whoever had the username @America on ExTwitter. Musk has turned it into a non-stop promotional feed for Donald Trump. He’s even put that account in his bio:
Such neutral. Very trust.
Even more incredible is that whoever owned the @America account before (while not using it lately) had in the past been critical of Elon’s political views. As Binder tracked down, when Musk took @America, he gave the original account the slightly less memorable @America123_12. Very creative. But at that account, you can see whoever owned it challenging Musk on his bogus political views.
Again, I’m just trying to imagine how the entire MAGAsphere/Fox News/etc. world would be completely losing their minds if Zuckerberg ever took someone’s Instagram handle to support a Democratic politician. Or if Jack Dorsey had ever done that with Twitter.
Reps. Jim Jordan and James Comer and Senators Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Josh Hawley would have announced hearings already, dragging those CEOs to Capitol Hill to be yelled at about their biases.
But with Musk… nothing. I’m not saying that there should be Congressional hearings here. There shouldn’t be. Musk has the legal right to do this, and Congress should have no say in the matter. But you also know that’s true about Zuck and his election infrastructure spending (which wasn’t even to benefit either candidate) and the GOP turned it into a whole big thing.
Here, it’s clear that Musk is now using his control over the website to make decisions about users to favor Trump directly. And it’s at least worth calling out the hypocrisy.
Still, if we take Elon at his own words, Elon Musk says that ExTwitter no longer deserves the public trust. So maybe stop giving it to them.
