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>>>In 2020, a contribution made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s private foundation to an organization that planned to provide grants to elections officials was cast as a devious effort to turn out more Democrats. Zuckerberg was broadly pilloried on the right despite the lack of evidence that the donations aided Democrats or even were meant to aid Democrats. Yet there’s no outcry for X owner Elon Musk’s explicit effort to use his platform (known four years ago as Twitter) on Trump’s behalf.
Musk has received only praise from Trump allies for explicitly endorsing the former president and for his support of a political action committee, America PAC, that aims to turn out Republican voters
by paying people to help identify targets. Musk’s activity on behalf of Trump goes far, far further than anything Zuckerberg did, including
massive (quiet) funding of right-wing efforts in 2022 and (loud) pledges to do more in 2024. X
took over the platform’s handle @America and handed it to the PAC to explicitly promote Trump’s candidacy.
Nor did Republicans express outrage at Musk
shutting down the account of reporter Ken Klippenstein. Klippenstein obtained and published a report that was allegedly part of the vetting process for Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio). Soon after, his account on X was shut down for sharing private information — “doxing” Vance, in the vernacular.
The information was allegedly stolen from a Trump aide
by hackers in Iran. The reason that the story about Biden’s son Hunter was limited
for several hours in October 2020 was concern that the information in the article was a function of Russian hacking, as information made public shortly before the 2016 election had been. The muffling of the Hunter Biden story (which, despite slanted polling,
almost certainly had no effect on the election) became a central element of the right’s insistence that social media companies were censoring their politics. The response to Klippenstein’s ongoing ban has been silence.
Musk’s purchase of Twitter was in part a reflection of his sharing a widespread belief on the right, one that predated the 2020 election, that the company specifically and social media companies broadly were intentionally censoring conservative users. The companies argued that they were, instead, reducing abuse and misinformation, with some prominent conservative users affected.
That argument was clearly robust from the outset, but it has been bolstered by recent research demonstrating that right-wing users were
more likely to share false claims on social media. If the social media company implements limits on sharing false claims, those users would be more likely to be affected — which, the research suggests, they were. Once Musk bought Twitter, those limits were largely abandoned, allowing false information to spread. Information that still often emanates from the right and that is still often offered in service to Trump’s political goals.
To use the parlance of the right, X has now been “rigged” in favor of Trump, just as voting in Georgia has been. If Trump wins next month’s election, Harris supporters will have a ready-made excuse for why that election was illegitimate. Except, of course, that Harris is very unlikely to be promoting the idea that it was. And except that there’s no evidence that such “rigging” would have much effect this year any more than it did four years ago.<<<
