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.
This tactic has manifested in the social media age in a way that befits the conspiracy theory-obsessed right in the MAGA era: A delusional insistence that conservatives are subject to imaginary "shadowbanning."
Having far-right opinions crop up more often will have a subconscious effect. It will make those ideas seem more popular, more normal, and more reasonable than they are.
Now, shadowbanning is a real practice, in which social media companies toggle your account's presence in an algorithm so that far fewer people see it. It's been used to reduce the spread of hate speech and disinformation. But there's absolutely no evidence that it's being used to suppress right-wing opinions based on political ideology. On the contrary, study after study shows that social media is biased toward right-wing opinions, and toward spreading false information, despite the half-baked efforts to stop it.
"Right-wing populism is always more engaging," a Facebook executive told Politico, because it appeals to "primitive emotion," instead of the more cerebral left-leaning content. Right-wing trolls don't just appeal to other right-wingers, either. By being provocative, they bait liberals into responding, driving up clicks and engagement.
But the myth of shadowbanning does serve a purpose on the right: It's a pretext to pressure social media companies to favor right-wing content, and even to go so far as to push it into the feeds of people who have not sought it out. When Musk fired an engineer, it was about more than punishing an employee for telling him the truth. It sent a signal to the rest of the staff: find some way to elevate Musk's tweets, and right-wing content in general, far beyond organic traffic.
In this, Musk is reflecting the pressure campaign he's been subject to from Republicans who want the system to boost their visibility beyond what their actual popularity gets them. As Kaitlyn Tiffany of the Atlantic discovered last month, Musk's takeover of Twitter did little to quell the false accusations from right-wing tweeters that they are "shadowbanned." On the contrary, though Musk went out of his way to restore neo-Nazis, bigots, and other hate-tweeters, MAGA bloggers continued to bellyache about totally imaginary blacklisting. To make things worse, congressional Republicans like Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, have started to whine about non-existent "shadowbans," as well, often solely because they think they should be getting more retweets than they're getting. Musk, always eager for the good opinions of the worst people online, said he would look into it.
It's the same "working the referees" tactic that has long worked to tilt the mainstream media into a pro-Republican bias.
If the story about firing an engineer is an indication "looking into it" means, then the answer is simple: Pressuring the few remaining Twitter employees to rewrite the software so that it's serving right-wing propaganda up to people who didn't subscribe to it. This theory got another boost on Sunday when Musk tweeted about a "Long day at Twitter HQ with eng team," which sounds very much like an employee torture session on what is supposed to be a weekend. Musk used a lot of jargon to explain what he browbeat his staff into doing, but it's not hard to read between the lines. He told his staff to stop penalizing accounts that have a lot of blocks on them, due to being right-wing trolls, from being served up on the "recommended" page. He also demanded an "increased # of recommended tweets."
In other words, they're being told to tweak the algorithm so that a bunch of right-wing trolls get regularly plugged into the feeds of people who don't follow them. You may have carefully cultivated your follow list to avoid being served fascistic propaganda on Twitter, but too bad. Through pages like "for you" on Twitter, expect to see these people anyway. (Indeed, Musk's tweets were served to me on my "for you" page today, even though I do not follow Musk or retweet him ever.)
But what's troubling isn't even that some liberals who don't want to read these right-wing trolls will get a full blast of it anyway. Hardened progressives will usually not be swayed by right-wing lies, just annoyed. The real concern is that tweaking the algorithms so that more authoritarian propaganda is visible will impact the heavily overlapping groups of gullible people and members of the mainstream press. Having far-right opinions crop up more often will have a subconscious effect. It will make those ideas seem more popular, more normal, and more reasonable than they are. It will open up more people to radicalization and cause the mainstream press to take preposterous GOP nonsense more seriously than they would have otherwise.
All of which is no doubt the point. The same day Musk used jargon-laden tweets to hint at a more right-leaning and disinfo-laden site, he showed up in a box seat next to Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch at the Super Bowl. Murdoch, of course, has spent years using the trappings of cable news to create the illusion of credibility for right-wing propaganda. He did so by claiming right wing lies were necessary as "balance" to the mainstream media. Musk's presence by his side was a clear signal that Musk has similar goals for using social media to whitewash repugnant lies. The good news is that his overall poor management of Twitter has caused a stampede of advertisers out the door. The company may not be around long enough to do the damage Musk is hoping for.
