Imagine being a member of the press and actively trying to get the authorities to go after people advocating for free speech.
— Craig Chamberlin (@CraigChamberlin) September 1, 2024
Elon Musk is rapidly transforming his enormous wealth – he’s the richest person in the world – into a huge source of unaccountable political power that’s now backing Trump and other authoritarians around the world.
Musk owns X, formerly known as Twitter. He publicly endorsed Donald Trump last month. Before that, Musk helped form a pro-Trump super political action committee. Meanwhile, the former US president has revived his presence on the X platform.
Musk just hired a Republican operative with expertise in field organizing to help with get-out-the-vote efforts on behalf of Trump.
Trump and Musk have both floated the idea of governing together if Trump wins a second term. “I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission,” Musk said in a conversation with Trump earlier this month streamed on X. “And I’d be happy to help out on such a commission.”
Musk reposted a faked version of Kamala Harris’s first campaign video with an altered voice track sounding like Harris and saying she doesn’t “know the first thing about running the country” and is the “ultimate diversity hire”. Musk tagged the video “amazing”. It’s got hundreds of millions of views, so far.
The Michigan secretary of state has accused the Musk-supported America Pac of tricking people into sharing personal data. Although the Pac’s website promises to help users register to vote, it allegedly asks users in battleground states to give their names and phone numbers without directing them to a voter registration site – and then uses that information to send them anti-Harris and pro-Trump ads.
According to a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk himself has posted 50 false election claims on X so far this year. They’ve got a total of 1.2bn views. None of them had a “community note” from X’s supposed fact-checking system.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/30/elon-musk-wealth-power
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