The Stench of Musk

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, a lot of people wondered if he'd let Donald Trump back on.  Many more wondered why he let Kanye West back on.  I simply wanted to know if and when Musk would make it possible to edit previously posted tweets or when he'd expand the maximum number of characters in tweets by another 140 to 420.

Instead, Musk - long celebrated as the first American automaker to successfully challenge Detroit's Big Three since the heyday of the AMC Pacer - endorsed a bogus homophobic theory surrounding the circumstances of the attack on Paul Pelosi, the Speaker of the House's husband.  

In response to a story Hillary Clinton tweeted a link to about the right-wing conspiracy theories Paul Pelosi's attacker spread online, Musk cited a story in the Santa Monica Observer about a possible homsosxual realtionship between Paul Pelosi and the assailant and how the incident at the Pelosi home in San Francisco was a lover's tiff. "There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye," Musk wrote.

There wasn't, and Musk deleted the tweet later on.  He should have done his homework before he tweeted; the Santa Monica Observer is known for fake stories like The Onion is, with one key difference - the Santa Monica Observer is not a satirical publication. A media watchdog group cited the online paper for "the routine publication of false and misleading information and the use of poor sources."

Musk said that he wanted to promote free speech on Twitter when he bought it, and he vowed to keep it from becoming a hellscape, but so far he's been making a hellscape of it himself since he took possession of Twitter.  He's trolled the New York Times by insisting that he did not "tweet out" the Santa Monica Observer link to the Times directly and dismissed The Guardian as a "far left wing propaganda machine."

Oh yeah, hate speech has increased fivefold on Twitter since Musk took it over.

So what can I do about this?  Apart from promising not to buy a Tesla, nothing, really.  I mostly use Twitter to post links to two of my blogs, including this one, and the only other social media site I post links on is LinkedIn.  Facebook still - still - won't let me publish links to my two blogs on the grounds that they're spam, and my attempts to have the ban reversed have amounted to nothing.

Maybe I should play the Powerball lottery and buy Facebook if I win the jackpot.  Then I can reverse the ban on links to my blogs and delete my Twitter account.  Oh yeah, and buy a Lucid.  

It's a thought.