Ever since he bought Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk has been titillating his fans with wild conspiracy theories from supposedly secret files. Now that Donald Trump is back in office—and has granted the world’s wealthiest private citizen free rein to dismantle federal agencies—Musk’s conspiratorial musings are no longer just entertainment for the extremely online. Internet fantasies have become a sufficient pretext for crippling the government.
In an alternate universe, I run a sprawling cabal. Its goal, according to the contrarian newsletters, crank blogs, and breathless podcasts where the fantasy plays out—is to silence right-wing populists on behalf of the deep state.
Each morning, Google Alerts arrive in my inbox detailing the adventures of a fictional character bearing my name. Last month she starred in an article about “A Global Censorship Prison Built by the Women of the CIA.
I didn’t wake up this morning planning to write about Twitter, and I’ve never woken up with the intent to write about Elon Musk. But this is the nature of Twitter: The spectacle sucks you in.Elon Musk, equal parts innovator and troll, has announced a formal bid to acquire Twitter, a platform he’d recently begun to describe as “the de facto public town square.
One Sunday morning in July of last year, a message from an anonymous account appeared on “Bernie or Vest,” a Discord chat server for fans of Senator Bernie Sanders. It contained an image of Shahid Buttar, the San Francisco activist challenging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the 2020 congressional runoff, and offered explicit instructions for how to elevate the hashtag #PelosiMustGo to the nationwide Trending list on Twitter.
Life can go back to normal in the United States only if millions more Americans get vaccinated against COVID-19. The problem is that today’s communication environment is perfectly engineered to discourage that. Wild claims go viral, and partisans exploit any scientific uncertainty for political advantage.