Elon Musk Can't Be Allowed To Shape Our Reality
The American left must remove itself from Musk’s propaganda machine and create a new reality for pro-democracy people and organizations
For as tragically wrong as I was about the 2024 election outcome, I was tragically correct about why Elon Musk shelled out $44 billion for Twitter in 2022.
I only wish I could switch those two. Nevertheless.
It was one of my first Bad Faith Times essays, analyzing what it meant for an increasingly erratic and radicalized billionaire to purchase the digital town square shortly after a setback (the 2020 election) for the international fascist movement. Maybe I gave Musk too much credit for his purchase of Twitter – maybe he just wanted to be liked, which is impossible for someone so fundamentally grotesque – but in my essay I predicted Musk would use the platform to reinstall Trump into power.
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Musk, after all, was one of many prominent fascists irate at Twitter’s decision to suppress the October 2020 surprise stories about Hunter Biden using drugs and having sex and possibly making money off his dad’s name. Twitter did not play ball with that classic right-wing hatchet job – a decision that surprised me in the most delightful way possible – and conservatives lost their fucking minds. The right’s bad-faith game had never met such resistance, and Trump lost re-election to a replacement level Democrat.
The most efficient way to make sure the right would not meet this kind of pushback from social media platforms was to have one of their own simply purchase the thing and use it as a weapon for right-wing causes. You could feel it in your marrow throughout the summer, after Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the excitable Silicon Valley boys became Trump fanatics after a registered Republican tried to assassinate him at a campaign rally in July. The site formerly known as Twitter was suddenly pumping out a constant stream of far-right propaganda that both normalized Trump’s blood-and-soil tirades and suppressed and contorted Democratic messaging. It was shortly after the assassination attempt that Musk went all in for Trump and deployed X as a veritable nuke in the information wars. Now we have the numbers to prove it.
Denny Carter
Researchers at the Queensland University of Technology found this was a twofold operation. Musk turned himself into the world’s foremost vector of far-right misinformation, posting nonstop pro-Trump content and forcing X users to see his shit at the top of their feed. Musks’ posts, according to the Queensland researchers, received 138 percent more views and 238 percent more retweets after Musk endorsed Trump in mid-July.
Getting Trump back into power – where he will undoubtedly shower Musk with government largesse – meant jacking up the X algorithm to boost a number of prominent pro-Trump and Republican accounts in the months before Election Day. This almost goes without saying if you spent time on Musk’s fascist hellsite in September and October. Every day I would be greeted with unhinged accounts and memes and videos that I did not follow and had never before seen. It’s not as if I had messed around with these accounts and suggested to the Almighty Algo that I’m interested in dangerous far-right political messaging. This shit was forced into my feed by a blatant adjustment to the algorithm, creating an information environment that, in hindsight, was far too hostile for any Democratic campaign to overcome.
This is why, after posting there more than 240,000 times over 13 years, I ditched the X platform back in October. I could no longer willingly expose myself to the algorithmic hell Elon Musk – in many ways the world’s most dangerous man – had created for me. I could no longer justify swimming in the ocean of shit that Musk had devised as a way of poisoning the American electorate. I had been submerged on Elon’s Shit Ocean for far too long. It was time to get out and towel off and maybe take a shower.
It’s why I fled to Bluesky before it was cool (Sick brag alert: I was one of the first 100,000 accounts, actually). I have some shame simmering below the surface for not abandoning Elon’s ship and burning the boats the day after he bought Twitter. I should have, but the dopamine was too good to me. Probably I’m not alone there.
Beyond being able to block right-wing trolls into a blackhole, I like posting to Bluesky because you can say something about David Bowie being cool and handsome without eight insecure fake alpha types quote-tweeting you to ask if you want to blow Bowie. You can post about fantasy football strategy without someone calling you a slur and asking if you’ve been castrated. You can be somewhat critical of an NFL quarterback without fans of that QB swarming your mentions with invective for 48 hours, then reposting your take every time the quarterback throws a touchdown, setting off a new swarm of adult fans whose entire identity is tied up in a team that does not know they exist.
On Bluesky, I can post a picture of my lunch without ten guys with “crypto” in their handles ask me what it’s like being poor. On Bluesky, I can talk about music without men with “girl dad” in their bios telling me to shut the fuck up and stick to football. On Bluesky, I can post a joke about Aaron Rodgers using corded headphones without someone informing me George Soros uses AirPods as a brain control device and that my thoughts had been compromised by a billionaire pedophile syndicate (this really happened).
Bad Faith Times contributor Dusty Schmidt wrote this week about how and why social media algorithms were slowly but surely shredding the underpinnings of a functional democratic society, namely by giving everyone their own reality, mutated and distorted as it may be. The short of Dusty’s point – one that he raised in the BFT discord a couple weeks ago – is that people who want to push back against authoritarianism that threatens to replace representative democracy have to stop letting Elon Musk and other bad actors shape their reality. In this way, I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say a platform like Bluesky, which does not have a black box algorithm feeding you shit that will keep you logged on and angry and stupid all day every day, could be invaluable in saving the United States from further tumbling into the dark heart of fascism.
I got a taste of just how contorted reality had become on Musk’s X platform when friends and family would text me about something they had seen on X that, they believed, all but ended Kamala Harris’ presidential hopes. I had moved on from X and was unsure of whatever controversy or statement they were texting about, so I would log back into the Shit Ocean and find my algorithm trying its damndest to make something out of nothing – a stray comment from a Harris campaign surrogate or some fake controversy about plagiarism or something. Musk wanted these things to be pushed to the forefront of X users’ minds, specifically the journalists who inexplicably use Musk’s propaganda site as an assignment editor. These nothingburger stories would then end up on CNN’s home page or generate 12 hours of coverage on Fox News and Musk’s job was complete – until the next news cycle, when his evil little algo would invent political reality for folks on the platform and, eventually, for the entire country.
I had been blissfully unaware of the pro-Trump stories created in Musk’s Shit Ocean until someone alerted me to them. To the people scrolling their timelines – controlled entirely by Musk’s algorithm – these stories were existential in nature. They had swam in the feces for so long they no longer noticed.
Taking control of what we see and read and ingest on our timelines is the only way we can reject billionaire fascists hoping to control our view of human events. I want to use Bluesky not just as a place to have fun online without the threat of neo-nazis storming my replies, but to have a better grip of political reality and to organize on the local and state level, as we did this week (and will continue to do) with Wisconsin’s upcoming Supreme Court election.
On Wednesday I attended an event hosted by Maryland Delegate Vaughn Stewart, who represents me in the state’s legislature. Governor Wes Moore, exuding considerable presidential vibes, introduced Stewart with a stirring call to make Maryland a sanctuary state – complete with more affordable housing – during the coming horrors of the second Trump administration. It was an inspiring speech, one that made me proud of my home state as seemingly every other state goes fash.
Vaughn spoke eloquently of the importance of affordable housing in a state that would use its resources to guard against the worst, most repressive and dangerous impulses of the Trump administration and its Project 2025 goons. The key to fighting back, he said, would be keeping our heads down and doing the hard work while Trump and his vast media apparatus – including Musk’s weaponized algorithm – introduced new and terrible outrages and injustices into everyday American life. We could not be distracted by these comments and policy proposals designed to anger us and make us disoriented, Vaughn said.
Keeping our heads down means the American left, collectively, must remove itself from Musk’s Shit Ocean and create a new reality for pro-democracy people and organizations. That looks an awful lot like Bluesky.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social
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