There is Only One Person to Blame for Twitter’s Demise: Elon Musk.

Did Musk undermine Twitter to help GOP in 2024?

As of Sunday afternoon, more than 90 million people had signed up for “Threads,” the new Meta alternative to the toxic cesspool known as Twitter. On its way, Threads broke the record for the most rapidly downloaded app ever.  And all of this is because of one person: Elon Musk.

In fact, Musk has achieved the unthinkable: He has actually made Mark Zuckerberg likable. (Or at least in comparison to Musk!)

Before Musk bought Twitter—closing the deal just over seven months ago—it was far from perfect.  Yet the former Twitter executives at least attempted to moderate hate speech by banning bigots from Neo-Nazis to white supremacists to Donald Trump. (I know, aren’t they all the same?!) But when Musk came in, he changed that.

At first, when Musk announced he would reinstate some formerly banned people, I thought it was perhaps a few, not so bad accounts in an effort to show the right they were welcomed on the platform because he thought that was good for business. But it very quickly became clear Musk was welcoming some of the vilest people out there--and just as bad-he was not moderating the hate speech as the old Twitter had. As the NY Times detailed in a December article about Twitter under Musk, researchers noted “they had never seen such a sharp increase in hate speech, problematic content and formerly banned accounts in such a short period on a mainstream social media platform.”

Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, told the Times: “Elon Musk sent up the Bat Signal to every kind of racist, misogynist and homophobe that Twitter was open for business,” adding, “They have reacted accordingly.”

For example-as the researchers documented: “Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day.” The Times also documented massive spike in slurs against Jews and members of the LGBTQ community.

One of the people Musk welcomed back on Twitter was Andrew Anglin, a self-professed Neo Nazi and publisher of The Daily Stormer. That was personal for me.  Anglin had targeted me in 2017 in response to an article I wrote at that time slamming then-President Donald Trump for refusing to denounce White supremacist violence. (This was months before the August 2017 White nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.)

Anglin first posted fabricated tweets on his White supremacist website that appeared to have been written by me claiming responsibility for an ISIS terrorist attack. (I’m Muslim.) He then instructed his followers to “confront me.” Given that readers of The Daily Stormer had in the past committed acts of violence — including apparently Dylann Roof, who murdered nine Black people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 — they did what Anglin asked.

I was soon inundated with death threats. However, if Anglin thought I was going to cower in fear, he was wrong. I sued him in federal court for defamation and emotional distress, where I won a default judgment of $4.1 million. While I still have not recovered a penny, I have long pledged to donate all the proceeds to organizations that fight the type of hate Anglin spews.

Anglin had also orchestrated targeted harassment of other minorities, including African American student Taylor Dumpson who successfully sued Anglin, and Tanya Gersh, a Jewish real estate agent who also sued Anglin, resulting in a $14 million judgment.

This is who Musk knowingly allowed back on Twitter. Reinstating Anglin not only helped normalize a Neo-Nazi, it also helped him recruit followers. Indeed, one of Anglin’s first tweets after Musk reinstated him on Twitter was: “Trying to find my friends. I lost them in 2013.”

But it was not just these despicable monsters that Musk put a welcome mat out for, he also personally trafficked in misinformation and cruelty—just like MAGA.  For example, last year when then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 82 year-old husband Paul was brutally beaten by a man who had broken into the Pelosi’s home looking to harm the Speaker, Musk amplified a baseless right wing conspiracy that Pelosi might have been engaged in some type of relationship with the attacker by tweeting it to his 112 million followers.

In April, Musk trafficked in more misinformation by labeling NPR—one of the right’s long time targets—as  “state-affiliated media” organization similar to foreign propaganda outlets such as Russia’s RT and Sputnik.

Musk—like many on the right—also used Twitter to mock the idea that people want to be called the pronoun they identify with, tweeting, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”  Of course, Fauci has been a target of the right since Covid—so Musk was pandering to MAGA in two ways with this one tweet.

When Musk was called out by some for promoting “hate toward already marginalized and at-risk-of-violence members of the #LGBTQ+ community,” he responded by doubling down with his tweet: “Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.”

More recently, the unbearable Musk tweeted in support of an anti-trans activist that, “The words ‘cis’ or ‘cisgender’ are considered slurs on this platform”—despite those being the correct ways to identify, “a person whose gender identity corresponds with the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth.” Ignore the logical flaw in what Musk was saying, in reality he was sending a message to anti-LGBTQ activists that he is on their side and has their (cisgender) backs.  

Beyond Musk’s amplifying of bigotry, spreading misinformation and celebrating cruelty, he is such a petty tyrant that in April he announced Twitter would restrict the sharing of Substack articles because he viewed Substack’s new platform, Notes, as competition with his own. This caused pain for many writers who make a primary living via Substack given Twitter was an important way for them to reach new readers.

And most recently, Musk announced on July 1 that he was imposing a limit on how many tweets people can read—even for those gullible/pathetic enough to pay him a fee each month to obtain a blue checkmark.  

Threads could not have picked a better time to roll out!

But there’s another vitally important issue at play with Twitter’s possible demise as we head into the 2024 election. I’m not sure if Musk intended this—although he’s openly supporting Ron DeSantis—but on the left we used Twitter a great deal in the past few elections to communicate about issues and organize. Perhaps Musk wanted to undermine that.

Regardless of his intention, as people leave Twitter in droves, we need to find a social media platform where we can continue to prepare for the 2024 presidential election--which will be the most important election of our lives.

Maybe Threads will be the new replacement for Twitter—which by the way I’m on! Perhaps it will be Substack’s Notes? Or a combination of platforms. But social media—at its best-- is a way to connect with like minded people who care about issues and want to make a difference.

Over the upcoming year as we approach the 2024 election, we must collectively migrate to a platform or platforms that enable us to do what we once did on Twitter when it comes to issues and elections.  I can not think of better form of revenge against Musk. (Okay, I can actually think of a few other better ideas for revenge but this one also saves our democratic Republic!)

---