Billionaire maintains his companies are doing the most to undermine the Kremlin
Absurd.
That’s what Elon Musk calls accusations these days that he is an apologist for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But it is easy to see why some are calling him Moscow Musk.
Frankly, when Putin is praising Musk, as he did earlier this month, and when the Musketeer Tucker Carlson is airing videos on the X social-media platform praising life under that authoritarian government as superior to the U.S., it is unnerving. When X is seeing a surge in Russian state-backed activity, as researchers say, and Musk’s satellite internet service, Starlink, is said to be used by Russian forces in the war against Ukraine, it is unnerving.
This past week, Musk called on his echoverse to lobby the Senate not to pass an aid package for Ukraine, in the latest example of the billionaire’s speaking out about the conflict that is dragging toward its second full year.
“There is no way in hell that Putin is going to lose,” Musk said this past Monday during an audio event on X.
Explanations have been offered, and unknowns persist. What’s especially jarring perhaps is the totality of the Musk-Russia touchpoints lately. It’s a lot of Russia, Russia, Russia for an extremely powerful man at the center of U.S. industry and increasingly key to strategic actions in space and communications.
And it’s ahead of the U.S. November elections, where debate will play out over X.
Reaction has been swift.
“Why is @elonmusk shilling for Russia now? Why is he still a US govt contractor?” Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, tweeted among those condemning Musk.
Some on X tried to make a thing of #MoscowMusk and #ElonMuskIsATraitor.
“Why is a US defense contractor (Elon) who gets $Billions in DoD contracts criticizing US security policy, in favor of our enemy, Russia?” asked Terry Virts, former commander of the International Space Station.
To Musk, airing his opinions freely is exactly what should be occurring on X and why, he has said, he acquired the platform in late 2022. He has said it had become too politically correct, too infected with liberal biases, to allow true public debate.
Some of what he was so critical about at then-Twitter, now X, was an apparatus expanded within the company after the 2016 presidential election and the late conclusion that Russian-backed actors had gamed it and other social-media platforms in an attempt to help Donald Trump become president. (Russia denied such activity.)
As X’s new boss, Musk slashed the company’s safety team along with other cuts throughout the organization. In January, the company said it would hire 100 new content moderators, a fraction of the more than 1,700 people it lost. That announcement came after some embarrassing blunders saw content go viral, such as AI-generated pornography of the pop star Taylor Swift’s likeness.
The European Commission has opened a formal investigation into whether the platform is living up to obligations to police harmful content. About the time the European Union’s new online-content law went into effect last year, the commission chastised X as being the platform with the largest ratio of “mis/disinformation.”
The commission is especially worried about Russia’s influence. “The Russian state has engaged in the war of ideas to pollute our information space with half-truth and lies to create a false image that democracy is no better than autocracy,” Vera Jourova, a European Commission vice president, said at the time as she urged X and other big tech companies to prepare for this year’s large lineup of elections around the world.
While Musk has bristled at the commission, the company has said it is focused on following the law and protecting freedom of expression.
Other changes by Musk have been more subtle. In April, X did away with state-affiliated labels on accounts such as RT, formerly Russia Today, which are often seen as propaganda arms of their governments. The move allowed them to have a bigger audience, experts say.
“Thanks to Elon Musk and the changes he has made to Twitter’s policies, Russian government and propaganda accounts have seen a surge of new followers and increased engagement, meaning that any Kremlin disinformation campaigns will reach a larger number of people, with little chance of being acted upon by Twitter,” Caroline Orr Bueno, a disinformation researcher at the University of Maryland, wrote recently in her newsletter.
Russian accounts have been amplifying calls for a U.S. civil war stemming from controversies over illegal migration, according to her research.
The tactics, including “amplifying extremes on both sides of a divisive issue,” were similar to those used in the run-up to the 2016 election, she added, and suggested the “civil war” push “represents a sort of trial run designed to see how much they can get away with in this new environment.”
Source : https://www.wsj.com/tech/elon-musk-x-twitter-russia-putin-b53f1891?st=dj6x7pbrkzjvfj0
