‘UNMUSKED’ — EU’s Musk Warning Confirms My Year-Old Report in Byline Supplement
As the EU warns Musk he must comply with fake news and Russian propaganda laws — as Twitter is found to have highest disinfo rate — my report from December 2022 gains new traction
It’s been nearly a year since I wrote Unmusked: How Elon Musk is Using Twitter to Destroy the Concept of Objective Truth.
I recall when I wrote that investigation for Byline Supplement, corporate media and tech reporters were focused on the over-priced purchase and not on the fact that Musk was running what I called The Twitter Operation. As my cohosts on RadPod taught me, this was a land grab in an information war to poison minds at scale. I knew Musk would destroy the communications platform, and I also predicted through my source Michael MacKay that he would swiftly turn it into a clone of VKontakte, the Russian information warfare site masquerading as a social media platform. The immediate goal for the US is to interfere with the 2024 election. Reports that he actively sabotaged Ukraine and is operating as a handmaiden for global authoritarians are often buried under CNN puff-pieces or a stenographer’s new book.
Because I know the US has blinders on to Russian interference, I decided that it was important in my Unmusked report to show that these kinds of operations are not uncommon in countries that are embracing authoritarianism, and I illustrated my report with historic examples from Germany, Hungary, Russia, and the Philippines to show how the destruction of communication is first-phase fascism.
Despite continued obfuscation by corporate and tech media, it has become pretty clear that Musk is a national and global security threat serving autocrats and working against democracy.
The EU just issued a stark warning to Elon Musk to comply with new laws on Russian propaganda and fake news, after a new report determined his platform has the highest ratio of disinformation posts of all large-scale social media platforms.
The new report exposes the scale of fake news on social media across the EU, and as my Unmusked report revealed, Musk operates as a bonafide Russian propagandist, according to Fiona Hill.
As my Cult of the Genius Tech Bro investigation in Byline Supplement evidenced, it’ll likely take more than a stark warning to eradicate tech-troll domination.
As I wrote in Unmusked last year:
When Twitter owner Elon Musk Tweeted his support for returning Crimea to Russia, Russian analyst Fiona Hill accused Musk of actively transmitting a message on behalf of Putin.
Canadian academic Michael MacKay agreed, describing it as ‘active measures’ - a term used to describe how the Soviet Union used covert disinformation operations.
“Under the guise of ‘free speech’ Musk’s purpose is to destroy civil speech – genuine communication that connects people”, MacKay explained. “Musk and Kremlin propaganda do not present a point of view. They seek to destroy the idea that truth and a shared experience of reality exist.”
To understand why the purchase of Twitter by a Kremlin-friendly billionaire matters, one need only to look how other autocrats and oligarchs around the world have abused their powers.
Donated Freedoms
In 2018, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban encouraged owners of hundreds of Hungarian media properties to ‘donate’ them to a Government allied foundation.
Freedom of the press has been on a steady decline in Hungary ever since.
Russia itself has a similar history. Two decades ago in Russia, as Vladimir Putin came to power, the media tycoon Vladimir Gusinksy said he was pressured to relinquish his empire to the Government.
In modern times, autocratic leaders are increasingly seeing the value of controlling social media. Former Philippines leader Rodrigo Duterte had a rabid fan base online, with an army of bloggers who defended him, and who also went after journalists critical of his savage anti-drug policies, which often resulted in bloody public executions.
“If it’s drugs, you shoot and kill”, he famously said.
Elon Musk’s former partner in PayPal, Peter Thiel, famously called Hulk Hogan a ‘single-digit millionaire’, as he defended funding the wrestler’s invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against the once-influential media site, Gawker. Thiel had been outed by the publication for being gay and according to multiple media reports, he spent $10 million dollars bankrolling Gawker’s death by a thousand legal cuts.
In his final column on August 22, 2016, Gawker managing editor Nick Denton wrote: “This is an act of destruction.”
He called it a “fitting conclusion to this experiment in what happens when you let journalists say what they really think”, and he called freedom “illusory”.
Michael Mackay said Musk’s nihilism runs contrary to the needs of a healthy functioning democracy, which requires a shared narrative of truth.
“Nihilists want the opposite of civil society”, said MacKay. “They want us to be angry, atomized, zombified and lonely individuals, crying out in a cacophony of noise.”
We appear to be at an inflection point, a moment in time when the awareness is growing that some tech ‘heroes’ and their oligarch allies are actually dangerous psychopaths intentionally harming liberal democracies in fealty to leaders of a transnational mob.
As my podcast partner Jim Stewartson wrote today:
“These are highly intelligent messianic narcissists who are also clinical psychopaths. They intentionally designed ‘social media’ and parasitic networks to give themselves the tools to rig evolution, and then they rigged it. In short, our system has allowed a group of aberrant psychopaths to change the way people think. They’ve used our new ability to connect with each other as an attack surface to erase our humanity.
“The psychological war we’re currently experiencing is ultimately a war for the future of whether we are to remain human. Are we going to sacrifice our humanity to be cogs in a system created by evil men, or are we going to rid ourselves of this cancer and be people again?”
I have always said this is a war on empathy, and with every psychopathic Tweet, cruelty is normalized, violence is normalized, and the cruelty is the point — to erode our empathy and our sense of decency, to make us think that everything and everyone is bad so what’s the point.
But that is an op — an unreality created by evil people trying to hide their corruption.
I work with people who expose these psychopaths, and I am damn proud of our collective efforts.
With each article and each report and each tweet thread, we leave documentation of reality. We are hurting their efforts to destroy our world.
I am grateful to live in a country where I am still free to write truth to power.
The alternative is just too awful.
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