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- More turbulence - 19th November 2024
For our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, who has spent 23 years with the BBC, and 41 years in journalism (when he was trained to use simple language, avoiding jargon), the reaction of those who have faced legal rulings has always been fascinating, and this is now underlined by Elon Musk’s astonishing response to being blocked in Brazil where he has shared an image of the judge responsible behind bars.
It seems that people don’t like it up ’em!
Last month, a supreme court judge in Brazil ordered that X be banned, and the response by the owner of the social media platform (Elon Musk) has been extraordinary. He has likened the judge Alexandre de Moraes to Darth Vader, and shared an AI-generated image of him behind prison bars.
Mr de Moraes had been spearheading an attempt to force X to purge anti-democratic, far-right voices in the wake of the January 2023 uprising in the capital, Brasília, carried out by supporters of the nationalist former President Jair Bolsonaro. For his part, Mr Musk, who has aligned himself with rightwing figures including Bolsonaro’s US ally Donald Trump, pushed back, accusing the judge of squelching free speech and trying to censor conservative views.
Mr Musk’s public attacks on Mr Moraes – many of them infantile and vulgar – were reminiscent of his repeated online digs at the UK Prime minister, Keir Starmer, during the recent far-right riots, which he was accused of inflaming.
His unbelievable reaction to being banned in the biggest country in South America and previous controversies have only confirmed my decision to have nothing to do with X. For many years stories on the website I edit, The Eye, were published automatically on Facebook (FB) and Twitter (then X). Now it is only FB, and what has happened recently has emphasised that this was the correct thing to do.
Yet his amazing Brazil response has not been the first time that Mr Musk has hit the headlines for the wrong reasons, with a leading columnist saying his social media site was “vile” and asking why people use it. In The Times, writer Janice Turner declared: “Elon Musk sits astride Twitter/X as the living embodiment of all that is screwed up and vile about his site…so now the question for users is why stay?”.
This came after a contentious comment by him on X that “civil war is inevitable”, highlighted what a controversial figure he is.
Mr Musk’s inflammatory announcement during the riots, showed him with a video in Liverpool, but a spokesperson for Sir Keir Starmer said the violence came from a small minority of people who “do not speak for Britain”, and the Prime Minister did not share the sentiments of the billionaire, who has himself been criticised for allowing far-right figures back on to his social media platform. The spokesperson added: “There’s no justification for comments like that. What we’ve seen in this country is organised, violent thuggery that has no place, either on our streets or online”.
Mr Musk also shared a video of a person purportedly being arrested for offensive comments online, asking: “Is this Britain or the Soviet Union?”, and replied to a post criticising UK policing, suggesting the police’s response “does seem one-sided“.
He shared, too, a fake Daily Telegraph (DT) article claiming Sir Keir was considering sending far-right rioters to “emergency detainment camps” in the Falklands. Mr Musk deleted his post after about 30 minutes but a screenshot captured by Politics.co.uk suggests it had garnered nearly two million views before it was deleted. In it, he shared an image posted by the co-leader of the far-right group Britain First (BF), Ashlea Simon, which she captioned with, “we’re all being deported to the Falklands”.
The fake piece, purportedly written by a senior news reporter for the DT and mocked up in the newspaper’s style, said camps in the Falklands “would be used to detain prisoners from the ongoing riots as the British prison system is already at capacity”.
Mr Musk seems to have unlikely backers. For instance the extreme right wing activist Tommy Robinson appears to be a supporter of his. A post by Mr Musk included a Family Guy meme featuring its main character in the electric chair, alongside the words: “In 2030 for making a Facebook comment that the UK government didn’t like”. Mr Robinson reposted it with the comment: “If it wasn’t for Elon Musk. The government and legacy media would’ve had me hung, drawn and quartered, without reply, over their failings”.
The present controversy shines the spotlight on previous information about Mr Musk. He has been described by his daughter as a ‘cruel and absent father’, and major firms boycotted his social media site after allegedly anti-Semitic remarks. Mr Musk had supposedly agreed with a post on X that falsely claimed Jewish or other people were stoking hatred against white people. He said that the user who referenced the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory was speaking “the actual truth”. The conspiracy theory holds that Jews or others are engineering the ethnic and cultural replacement of white populations that will lead to a “white genocide”. It has also been spouted during the riots, with Jews replaced by Muslims.
Major firms including Disney, Warner Bros and Sky News’ parent company Comcast pulled their advertising, and Lions Gate Entertainment as well as Paramount Global also said they were pausing advertising. It was reported that Apple was pulling ads too. IBM also halted its advertising on X after a report by Media Matters (MM), the US media watchdog, found that its ads were placed next to pro neo-Nazi content.
These are only the latest challenges to face Mr Musk, and he has always possessed a well-known propensity to turn to the law to resolve them.
It has been revealed, for instance, that a not-for-profit organisation was forced to close, because it was presented with a lawsuit from Mr Musk. His platform claimed the advertising group Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), illegally conspired to boycott advertising on his platform.
“GARM is a small, not-for-profit initiative, and recent allegations that unfortunately misconstrue its purpose and activities have caused a distraction and significantly drained its resources and finances”, the group said in a statement. It continued: “GARM therefore is making the difficult decision to discontinue its activities”.
Meanwhile, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Mr Musk is planning to throw $45 million a month behind Mr Trump’s presidential run (see story on Monday about his ‘immigrants eat pets’ outburst), because he claimed the Trump-Vance ticket “resounds with victory”.
This is amid figures showing that at one point the monthly US ad revenue at his social media site had declined at least 55 per cent year-on-year each month since he bought it. The company has struggled to retain some advertisers since the takeover, and the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Linda Yaccarino, met bank lenders who helped finance Mr Musk’s acquisition to outline the company’s business plans.
The extraordinary comments recently and the accusation of anti-Semitism, put centre stage his headline-grabbing views, but he has always denied that he is against Jews. He has, for instance, proclaimed: “To be super clear: I am pro free speech, but against anti-Semitism of any kind“.
But to Mr Musk’s critics this is pure humbug because he has described George Soros (the 93 year old Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, and a frequent victim of anti-Semitic attacks), as ‘reminding him of Magneto’ (a Marvel comic villain who is also a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust).
Mr Musk has also engaged in a very public spat with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which is a high-profile organisation opposing anti-Semitism and racism. He has threatened the ADL with legal action, blaming it for a collapse in advertising revenue, when it could, in fact, be to do with the nervousness of companies associating with him.
Of course, we are under no illusions that our stance is likely to make any difference whatsoever – X is still (even after leading firms pulled their advertising), a gigantic business. We know that The Eye not using X will almost certainly have no impact at all, but it seemed the right thing to do.
Mr Musk is unlikely to respond to this in the same way as he has to the judge in Brazil who he has likened to Darth Vader, as well as sharing an image of him behind bars…
The memories of Phil’s, decades long award-winning career in journalism (when he always avoided making anti-Semitic comments) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disease Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
