Why Don't the Genocidal Killers (or the Liberal Establishment) Like Elon Musk?

The campaign against Elon Musk and his social media platform has become more shrill than ever. What is it actually all about?

If you watch Al-Jazeera or any number of other non-western media platforms, you will see live footage of a genocidal bombing campaign being waged with absolutely no discretion whatsoever against the civilian population -- largely children and babies -- of the Gaza Strip, by the US client state of Israel, armed by American weaponry, with unlimited American financial support and unlimited American diplomatic cover, regardless of the extent of the war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed by the minute.

If you're watching BBC or CNN, reading the New York Times, or tuned in to NPR, to name a few random mainstream media examples, you'll get the impression that among the many other important news stories in the world and domestically in the US today such as Taylor Swift's record-breaking tour profits and how Christmas shopping trends are going so far this season, there are also hostage negotiations going on, and, oh yes, a bit of unfortunate collateral damage as well -- but don't forget, the people really responsible for all of this are the Arab terrorists, not the Jewish lovers of peace and democracy who they hate because Arabs hate freedom.  Look, this very centrist Israeli politician even said so!

The difference in the version of reality I get from my social media feeds is equally stark.  Contrasting what is still by far the world's biggest platform, Facebook, with the world's twelfth most popular platform, Twitter/X:  when I look at my feed on Facebook I will occasionally be reminded in some way that there is this war going on, because of an American who resigned from their position in protest against the war, but otherwise I'm featured to a selection of posts reminding me that Roger Waters is a very controversial figure who is accused of antisemitism and being an apologist for terrorism, Bruce Springsteen has another concert tour coming up, my friend Maria has an adorable new profile picture, another friend got a new job, and someone else's father died of old age.  I see not a single picture from the war in Gaza in my feed.

On my feed on X/Twitter, I see carnage.  I see completely appropriate carnage -- I see posts from my actual friends and from the journalists and activists that I follow on the platform.  I follow the same accounts on Facebook, but nothing they post comes up in my feed.  On X, most of what I see is about the genocidal bombing campaign Israel is waging against the Palestinian people.  There are also quite a few posts from the many supporters of imprisoned journalist, Julian Assange, that come up, because I'm a supporter of Julian's and I intentionally follow many of his other supporters.  And because in the real world, rather than the one that CNN, Facebook, and the US authorities want us to see, millions of people are deeply concerned with the injustice of imprisoning the most significant exposer of American war crimes alive today, and with implications for freedom of the press and for the rest of us generally.

Now, another news story that the mainstream media from the US is currently pumping out new articles about by the minute is Elon Musk's brief comment to a brief post that seemed fairly obviously to have been a very awkward and badly-worded effort to criticize the kinds of identitarian groups habitually funded by foundations supported by George Soros.  It's just a few words, and therefore very open to interpretation.  Interpreted in the most charitable way possible, it's a post that is part of a much bigger conversation about which groups George Soros funds, and why -- which is an entirely legitimate area of inquiry, obviously.  Interpreted in the least charitable way possible, it's an antisemitic statement from someone who may think there's a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world.

Along with this news story, you'll find in the mainstream western news an endless stream of other stories seeking to illustrate in one way or another that there is a massive rise in antisemitism happening now around the world.  Every effort is made in each instance to de-contextualize this supposed rise in antisemitism from the fact that the self-proclaimed Jewish State is currently engaged in a genocidal bombing campaign funded by American money, using American weapons.  Every effort is also made to inject the notion that any suggestion that a Jewish billionaire who donates profligately to all kinds of different causes may have a political agenda is a form of antisemitism.

Some of the world's biggest corporations, very notably Apple, have now stopped advertising on X.  There's a lot of talk about whether they may take X off of the Apple app store, which could be the end for most any platform in the modern world.  What we're seeing is a very, very serious effort to bring Elon Musk to heel, to get him on board with the program of censorship and algorithmic control over what kind of reality we are all exposed to -- to get him to obey the dictates of the censorship-happy authorities across the western world that have so successfully brought Facebook and TikTok under their control.

It's extremely fashionable these days to analyze tweets and comments on posts without giving them any broader context to speak of, and then to draw all sorts of wild conclusions rooted in intellectual extrapolations made based on a ridiculously insufficient amount of data.  This is exactly the method by which the British Labor Party was purged of its supposedly antisemitic members.  Using bots to trawl through Twitter posts and then interpreting all of them in the most uncharitable way possible, with no understanding of context allowed.

If you want to assassinate someone's character, this is what you do, and this is obviously what they're now doing with Elon Musk.  Of course, for a billionaire with his family background and long record of making cryptic statements on Twitter, it's easy to find reasons to accuse Musk of all kinds of things.  But are the army of corporate journalists currently aiming their guns at the richest man in the world and the owner of the twelfth-biggest social media platform actually concerned with his alleged prejudices against various groups of people?  Or do they have another agenda?

For those of us who were not born yesterday and who are not working for and have not yet successfully been reprogrammed by Facebook, and who are not working for a hate group such as the ADL, or for a western corporate or "public" propaganda outlet, the answer to this question should be abundantly obvious:  they desperately want Musk to adhere to their strict censorship regime, and they are outraged by his unwillingness to do so.

For those of you who are under thirty, or are perhaps over thirty but who have never been actively engaged on Facebook or Twitter, let me give you a little helpful background before I continue.

Before those of you who are under thirty became adults, Facebook was a very different platform.  This is the platform that got so many of those of us who lived through the Golden Age of the Internet (1995-2005) to abandon most other means of communication in favor of Facebook pages and Facebook news feeds.  It was once the case that Facebook's news feed was largely a chronological accounting of the posts people we intentionally follow on the platform were putting out there.  We saw largely the kinds of things we wanted to see, much like with signing up to an email announcement list.  This also meant that for those of us with a big platform for our essays or music or whatever else, if we had more followers, we were more likely to have more people see our posts.  This all changed a few years into Facebook's existence, when the feed became a completely opaque phenomenon based on unknown algorithms, having very little to do with who you follow or what you want to see.

This is how it is that we get such starkly different versions of reality from one platform to the next, even though we may be following the same sorts of people and organizations on the various platforms.

In the past few days, TikTok management is being praised for so enthusiastically censoring their platform, to eliminate any discussion of Osama Bin Laden's Letter to America from 2001, where he explains his motivations for organizing the September 11th attacks.  I don't actively use TikTok, but according to all the reports I've heard, a few days ago posts about this letter, and how it relates to the current "war on terror" being waged on the civilian population of Gaza and the West Bank, were very popular on the platform.  Overnight, after receiving a censorship directive from the US authorities, this changed.  Now you won't find any such posts on TikTok.

To illustrate on a very up-close and personal level the difference between the platforms as they are now run:  since the war on Gaza began, as a singer/songwriter inclined to write about such things, I have written several songs.  Each one of them has consistently gotten around ten times as much exposure on X than on all the other platforms I posts to, combined.  A song promoted by Stella Assange and others involved with the campaign to free Julian has been seen 188,000 times within a couple of days, but on all the other platforms where it appears, the view count is less than 1% of that number, last I checked.  This despite the fact that the campaign is active on many platforms, trying to disseminate the same content on all of them.  This has been typical for years, in terms of anything I or the Assange Defense campaign posts ever going viral, as far as I've observed.  Virality these days only happens for people like me on X -- nowhere else.  The days when this sort of thing happened on other platforms with songs like mine ended a long time ago -- but I do remember them well.

As the authorities have been mounting their frenetic campaign of accusations against Elon Musk and his platform's lack of sufficient interest in censoring posts and policing the use of what supporters of Israeli fascism, among others, claim are antisemitic tropes, Musk has made a statement, in the form of an X post of course, that has become the fodder for untold numbers of news stories over the past few days, as these same outlets for the most part studiously ignore the fact that the Gaza Strip is on the brink of famine, and every head of every UN agency and every humanitarian organization is holding press conference after press conference trying to communicate this fact to the world.  (If you want to see these emergency press conferences, you can find them as breaking news on Al-Jazeera, and just about nowhere else.)

In his post, Musk stated:  "As I said earlier this week, 'decolonization,' 'from the river to the sea' and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide. Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension."

Somewhat to my surprise, it's not only the liberal media establishment, but also more libertarian-oriented journalists and others who are expressing their outrage at this post.  Everyone that I've read seems to be taking it at face value, and assuming he means what he says.  I think they're all wrong.  Here's my interpretation of what Elon is up to.

First of all, as with TikTok or Facebook, Musk fully has the technological ability to censor whatever content they want to.  They are fully capable of introducing censor-approved algorithms as well, to throttle or completely cut off from view whatever content they don't want us to see, regardless of who we're trying to follow on the platform, just as Facebook and TikTok have done so successfully.  However, these phrases and this kind of content has not yet been censored on X.  These words, phrases, and hash tags have not yet been censored or, as far as I can tell, throttled or shadowbanned on X.

If, in the face of such tremendous pressure from the world's most powerful institutions to censor and throttle content on his big, increasingly money-losing social media platform, Musk is not actually censoring these phrases or ideas, what, instead, did he actually mean by this post?

My take -- which so far makes much more sense according to the actual evidence than what all the journalists are currently pumping out -- is Musk has no intention of censoring these words or phrases.  He is simply -- and quite eloquently, I'd add -- making the point that if you want to censor phrases like "from the river to the sea" because they supposedly advocate genocide, then we will also have to censor phrases like "decolonization," which can also just as easily be interpreted as supporting genocide.  What do all you anti-racist, anti-colonial American liberals who also happen to support the genocide of Palestinians think about that, huh?

To further elucidate my point:  since long before 2020, the idea of "decolonizing" the USA has been a popular notion among those campaigning for the rights and sovereignty of indigenous people.  It's generally a very vague concept, often, it seems, intentionally so.  No one seriously thinks the use of the term in the US context is advocating a genocide of white people or other non-native people who currently live on this stolen continent.  To "decolonize" is very broadly understood to be something we need to do with our minds, and perhaps even in terms of things like the distribution of things like land, wealth, and political power.  No serious advocate of the concept of decolonization supports the genocide of white people or anyone else.  The idea is simply ridiculous, and Elon knows this.

So why is he saying he's going to censor the word "decolonize"?  Because he's making fun of all the liberals and journalists who are currently engaged in what is obviously an ADL/AIPAC-fueled campaign to associate the term "from the river to the sea" with the genocide of Jews -- as actual Jews are committing an actual genocide of Palestinians, as we discuss Elon Musk and antisemitism.  Elon knows that "from the river to the sea" does not, for Palestinian civil society groups or for the vast majority of other people chanting the phrase at marches, have anything to do with killing all the Jews, but rather with the idea of all the people living within the historic land of Palestine being equal and free.

So he's saying, OK, we'll ban that phrase.  And then which one shall we ban next?  He is, I think quite obviously, making an eloquent -- and even humorous -- statement against censorship, illustrating what a slippery slope censorship inevitably always is.

He is, I would argue, simply throwing the ball back into the court of the powerful politicians and owners of the corporate and "public" media propaganda machines, and telling them if they want to flagrantly violate their own Constitution's most cherished First Amendment, then let them do so directly, rather than by finding so many different ways of shouting at Elon Musk.  If they want censorship, let them pass censorship laws, criminalizing the use of phrases and words they don't like.

Well done, Elon Musk.  I know you're a billionaire full of contradictions, and you should be paying your workers much more, and doing a lot of other things differently.  But I hope, for the sake of freedom of speech and access to information, you keep sticking it to the man, in your role as the owner of X.  Despite all the significant design flaws that the platform seems to have which facilitates trolling and bullying and all sorts of horrible things, at least in comparison with all the other big corporate social media platforms, X seems to be the only one left that isn't engaged in forms of censorship and thought control that Orwell didn't even dream of.