How bad will it get?

Elon Musk has already turned Twitter into a propaganda machine. If Trump wins -- with the approval of the Silicon Valley billionaire class -- what's next?

Well here we go, the cursed election is finally upon on us, and we have reached what must be near-historic levels of everything feeling very, very bad. For me, as for too many of us, the direct conduit for a lot of this very bad feeling is X, né Twitter, and the one solitary guaranteed outcome of this election is that no matter who wins, the platform will be even worse in the days during and following it.

We think it’s bad now, with Elon Musk tweeting “Interesting” to every self-described ‘race realist’ who shares some graph they made in MS Paint about great replacement theory, or tweaking the algorithm to boost users who post ‘evidence’ that Haitians are eating neighbors pets. Just wait until Musks’ blue checkmark army, eager to get promoted into the For You feed or even win the lottery with a QT from Elon himself, start sharing ‘proof’ of election interference.

There’s going to be election-themed AI slop, photos and video edited in bad faith, a torrent of casual racism and hatred towards migrants, and so much braindead/cynical poster’s rage that, like a collapsing star, it will be hard to look directly at it. And Musk will be personally surfacing lots of it.

Plenty has been written about Elon Musk’s all-in turn for Trump, the war chest he’s bequeathed the Trump campaign, the cynical stunts from his SuperPAC, and the very probably illegal register-to-vote-to-win schemes he’s orchestrated in swing states. How the richest man in the world who once bemoaned the politicization of the platform has turned it, enthusiastically, into a propaganda machine on behalf of Donald Trump. Here’s

Jacob Silverman

, from a piece in the Nation called “Elon Musk Eyes a Shadow Presidency”:

Musk did all he could to promote Trump’s candidacy on X. Through a series of feature changes, including the site-wide promotion of right-wing accounts—most especially his own—Musk turned X into 4chan lite. The platform became a sewer of bad information, bigotry, and Nazis stumping for Trump. Musk is the goblin king of this dank fiefdom, plucking inane, racist, wholly fictional posts from the rivers of shit and using them to juice his worshipful followers’ political hysteria.

The question is, how far could all this go? How much worse will it get? We’re in uncharted waters. Never before has a social media network trafficked by so many millions of users be so entirely turned into a political platform, dedicated to a particular and particularly noxious political project. If Trump wins, Musk’s role will be seen as a deciding factor, and whether or not he actually takes any official role, he will wield power in an entirely new way—and he’ll wield a lot of it through X.

I don’t think it’s worth spending too much time speculating about the uses that Musk could put his social media platform in his capacity as a Trump administration insider, but for two men who have made their explicit project to deport migrants and ‘end wokeness’, none of it bodes well, especially for vulnerable populations.

I really hope we’re not about to find out. But even we don’t, this should be a wakeup call. After all, a large swath of Silicon Valley leadership, of which Musk is the most visible figurehead, is all too happy to participate in what Trump’s own former staff have termed a fascist project. Unlike 8 years ago, there’s little pearl clutching or opprobrium from the tech industry’s prime movers—in fact, it’s closer to the opposite.

Jeff Bezos intervened to spike the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, and the biotech billionaire (and my former employer) Patrick Soon-Shiong did the same at the Los Angeles Times, both moves are widely seen as bet-hedging in the event of a Trump victory. Meanwhile, Trump says that other Silicon Valley billionaires have called him to offer support—Sundar Picchai at Google, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who confirmed he did phone Trump, and publicly called him a “badass” after the assassination attempt. The crypto billionaires, like Musk, are all-in for Trump, and are one of the cycle’s single biggest campaign contributors. As the veteran labor reporter Steven Greenhouse argued in Slate, if Harris loses, one of the biggest reasons will be the billionaires.

It’s not hard to see why those billionaires are all too happy to see another Trump term, regardless of whether they find the civil rights crises and rollbacks to women’s reproductive health impolitic—two of Biden’s best achievements have been a persistent thorn in Silicon Valley’s side; empowering the FTC to take on antitrust, and awakening the National Labor Relations Board from its decades-long slumber. Silicon Valley would very much like both of them to go away.

As I wrote in my post looking at Trump, Harris and tech policy, this is an arena where, unlike abortion, or, you know, support for the concept of democracy, the differences are a matter of degree, not kind; Harris’s surrogates, like Mark Cuban, appear optimistic they can get her to fire FTC chief Lina Khan, whose department as acted as the single biggest check on Silicon Valley power in decades. (Meanwhile, there are a cadre of conservatives, which may or may not include JD Vance, who are fans of Khan for the same reason.) Trump would be more likely to wield the FTC as a political tool, against companies he perceives to have treated him unfairly—something those tech CEOs recognize, hence the phone calls. And he would absolutely disempower the NLRB at a moment when organizing is both critical and catching fire, and in need of all the support it can get, inside the tech industry and out.

Look, ‘tech’ on its own is not even in the top 10 most pressing issues this election cycle—there is abortion, and Gaza, and climate change, and immigration law, and civil rights, and the list goes on. But our ability to fight on behalf of all of those things gets much more difficult when the platforms, digital infrastructure, and monopolies that govern our digital lives are run by profiteering billionaires who can elide any meaningful regulation, and are free to do whatever is in their best interests, not ours. For just one example, recall that Twitter used to be a pretty good place to get public service updates, expert information, and to organize.

Yes, I worry that Harris is too cozy with Silicon Valley, and isn’t going to prioritize labor—but she can be pushed and organized against. On labor, on gig work, on AI and crypto regulation, on consumer protections, Trump will be unyielding. If he wins, I fear we will see a union of Silicon Valley’s ownership class, at its rawest, richest, and most authoritarian, and a president eager to use any tool at his disposal to punish and persecute his enemies. Like I said, if you think Twitter is hell now, go ahead and broaden those horizons. Whatever happens on Tuesday, it should light a fire under all of us—tech infrastructure is civic infrastructure, and it’s time we start working to take back the digital commons from unaccountable billionaires.

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