Five years after being banned on Twitter, Elon Musk re-instated Alex Jones on X in Dec 2023. Within three days the odious racist and conspiracy theorist accumulated over 800,000 followers. Recall that Alex Jones had played a critical role in hyping disinformation during the run-up to the MAGA attack on the US Capitol 6 Jan 2021 and he was financially crippled for spreading lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting. The revolting anti-Muslim bigot Laura Loomer and the loathsome Kremlin-supporting Tucker Carlson has also joined X, completing the trifecta of trash.
NBC News now reports that Elon Musk’s X is a thriving hub for Nazi propaganda, with paid subscribers sharing speeches by Adolf Hitler or content praising the genocidal Third Reich. At least 150 “Premium” subscribers and thousands of unpaid accounts have posted or amplified pro-Nazi content on X in recent months, including praise of Nazi soldiers, sharing Nazi symbols, and outright Holocaust denial.
According to the research firm Sensor Tower, in February 2024 X had 174 million daily active users worldwide. In March 2024, one post with 1.9 million views promoted the long-debunked conspiracy theory that six million Jews did not die in the Holocaust.
The Southern Poverty Law Center advises that online hatred contributes to violence offline. Payton S. Gendron, the 18-year-old man who on 14 May 2022 murdered ten and wounded three people of color in Buffalo, NY testified in court that he “believed what he read online and acted out the hate.”
Elon Musk is now blithely overseeing his own Axis of Evil at X, social media pariahs Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Loomer. Hypocritically, monetizing rightwing or Nazi content contradicts one of Elon Musk’s early pledges when he bought Twitter in October 2022.
Sources:
www.nbcnews.com/… www.cnn.com/… www.splcenter.org/… www.cbsnews.com/…www.cnn.com/...