Twitter is a Trump campaign website – and it could break your brain

Elon Musk’s $44 billion donation to Trump will make the site less than unusable by October.

It’s time to admit that the oligarchs are done with democracy. 

They want their Trump, and they will do anything they can to get it. And they’re used to getting what they want, no matter what we want.

In Popular Information, Judd Legun and Rebecca Crosby note the noxious duplicity of Elon Musk’s $35 million-a-month pledge to elect Donald Trump. In short: Elon isn’t letting the racist right-wing lies that he parrots like a human incarnation of Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules get in the way of winning. 

He’s focused on the most effective possible method of delivering votes that his money can buy (which shows that he knows Trump’s Big Lie is complete BS):

According to the Wall Street Journal, America PAC will focus on "persuading constituents to vote early and request mail-in ballots in swing states." Already, America PAC has hired hundreds of workers who are "having conversations with constituents in swing states and urging voters to request mail-in ballots." 

This is how you win. And it’s what Trump didn’t do in 2020, so Elon is doing it for him.

The feigned ignorance of the press about Elon’s political leanings–despite undeniable evidence of his union bashing, abetting racism, rampant misogyny, massive tax avoidance, and hostility to trans people despite (or because of) being a father to one–has led us to a crisis.

Elon’s public declarations and donations this summer force us to admit three things:

1. Twitter is now a Trump campaign site.

   Since he bought the site, it has operated as his neo-Nazi Super PAC. And like anyone who thinks neo-Nazism deserves a place in America, he’s obsessed with Donald Trump. Now, you can be assured that the point of every experience on that site is to drive you away from voting for Biden/Harris and toward the Republican Party.

2. Elon has made Twitter far less relevant, but unfortunately, it still matters.

   Twitter’s experience sucks. The replies are designed to be suck-up alley for Groypers and MAGA stepdads. The algorithm and follow suggestions are designed to send you to Elon or his pals. And the ads make you feel like you stepped in a pile of scabies trying to sell relief for pubic lice. Yet, it still requires the assignment editor for too many reporters. This is mostly because no other site has been able to replace it. Bluesky is too small. Threads doesn’t want politics. Mastodon is good as a utility but no narrative can survive in what’s designed to be a united outskirts of the internet. So what happens on Twitter matters. And it matters a lot more if we take it out of Twitter.

3. Using Twitter for news is harmful to democracy.

   I have to be soulless for a second and explain why Twitter is still relevant. It’s because of me or tryhards–wannabe writers, creators, influencers–like me and far more successful than me. We do not want to give up what we’ve spent over a decade building, and that’s a connection to people. Some people I can only reach over Twitter DMs. It’s pretty essential to my producing and sharing my content. And I’m ashamed of that. Like meat, fossil fuels, and alcohol, it’s something I would give up if I had the integrity and restraint I wish I had. But I don’t. So I use the machine to rage against.

   Increasingly, I try to stay the hell out of the “For you” tab for two reasons:
   a) Most people have no idea what is going on on that site; by making the site irrelevant, Elon has made it so that people know he’s gone fashy but they have no idea that he spends his days in the Nazi-est part of his Nazi bar and b) What we consume becomes our reality. I’ve said repeatedly that if we’re talking about “the border” in October, it’s Trump’s race to win. And I guarantee you that if you log into Twitter this October and dip into the algorithm, you will get tons of racist scaremongering about immigration, no matter how low actual border crossings dip. Because that’s the plan.

No one loved Twitter more than me. Except maybe Elon Musk, who did the thing he does to anything he seems to love. He wrecked it for everyone else.

But the site is extremely useful for him and his oligarch friends. They think it could help Trump win. And they wouldn’t have spent $44 billion to make it worth maybe a fourth of that. 

Oligarchs know power. They know that power comes from shaping brains. And they’d like you to step in and spread some hate so they can get back to the serious work of crushing unions again.