Elon Musk’s Great Leap Forward

It's propaganda, stupid!

When he bought Twitter a short time ago, American financial analysts were bursting with enthusiasm. Their analysis of an incredibly stupid financial move with no return was demanded all over the media. It was obvious that Elon Musk had bought Twitter well above the price, and it was also very clear that new owner behaved weird. Did he, really?

During the purchase media had a harvest. They all grazed on Elon's future losses. All the big advertisers left first, so Twitter lost a substantial part of its revenue. Then Elon Musk fired majority of the core employees, the entire accounting department, the entire safety department (which took care of eliminating and detecting trolls, hate speech, child pornography and violence). He fired most of the software engineers who oversaw designing main functionalities and user satisfaction. He stopped paying for offices. Havoc everywhere.

Twitter survived, much to the astonishment of all those analysts who didn't understand the game. But like a gutted, limp zombie full of malfunctions and empty gimmicks, whose real purpose gradually emerges, as if out of the fog.  And it looks very familiar to us inhabitants of the former Eastern Europe.

Yes, the talk is about propaganda. It's the only explanation that makes sense to this strange behavior. Among the investors in this apparently loss-making business, we find banks and funds (Bank of America, Societe Generale, Barclays, BNP Paribas...) and large private equity funds from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and others (which the American FINCEN generally refers to as the primary sources of money laundering). Musk's business connections with China and its investor Binance are also worth mentioning.

Today, Twitter needs neither advertisers nor satisfied clients from coastal cities. It needs users and networks of amplification bots who will get into the heads of ordinary folks by constantly repeating the chosen information.

During his "Great Leap Forward," Elon has gradually devastated a part of Twitter's personnel and technology base that is either unnecessary or downright a nuisance from a propaganda point of view. All that remained was a gnawed-on skeleton that fulfills the needs of amplification customers. Yes, amplifying anything to order was, is, and will remain Twitter's most valuable commodity. And it remained completely intact. Quite the contrary. As newly established private company, Musk got rid of unpleasant shareholders, throwing away any type of difficult oversight of his intentions. We do not know who is hiding behind banks and private equity funds, but we see how users are gradually getting used to the unthinkable like boiled frogs. And believe me, the unthinkable was the feature, not a bug.

Twelve hours after the takeover, the number of vulgar racial insults on Twitter increased by five hundred percent. All the mouthpieces of Russian propaganda are back. Including accounts such as Dimitry Medvedev, Margarita Simonyan (who thanked Elon movingly) and thousands of notorious American trolls who voluntarily spread Russian and anti-Ukrainian propaganda on US soil.  Elon Musk first put the same labels on all Western public media that Twitter had previously given only to the media of authoritarian states such as the China Morning Post or RT. All of them received labels that had previously only been used by propaganda outlets: State affiliated media. It is hilarious that famous public broadcasters in Europe, such as the BBC, have also been given this designation. Elon silenced the storm of indignation by removing the label from everyone, including dangerous Chinese and Russian propagandists.

Most of the dismissed or voluntarily resigned engineers did not keep the experiences of the last days of their stay on Twitter to themselves and confided in the media. Thanks to them, we know, for example, that Twitter has completely removed algorithms that reduce the reach not only of Kremlin propaganda, but also of states where freedom of speech is actively persecuted, such as Saudi Arabia, which is one of the major current co-owners of Twitter.

Musk, meanwhile, has waged a fierce battle to preserve his own image, as he is increasingly being told that he is not the self-made wonder man he originally made himself out to be. Journalists are now writing about him that he was financed by his father Errol Musk, who owned, among other things, emerald mines in Africa. Elon recently offered a million dodgecoins (his own cryptocurrency he invented) to anyone who could prove that the "mythical mines" really existed. Then his father, Errol Musk, spoke up and gave an interview to the British newspaper The Sun and described exactly where his mines were in Zambia and said that he had never made a secret of the fact that he financed his children.

This week, the Washington Post also got hold of classified and recently leaked law enforcement material leaked by a young man from the U.S. AirForce Jack Teixeira on the Discord gaming forum. The materials show that the American security community underestimated the ability of the Russians to regenerate their disinformation networks and always remain one step ahead of the US defense. The documents show that platforms such as Facebook, Google and others manage to catch just one percent of Russian fake accounts that spread propaganda. In this context looks the purchase of Twitter and Elon’ s Armageddon tales about the AI killing us all as a huge propaganda Op.

DFRLab, which analyzes disinformation activities, has released a special report showing a jump in the influence and viewership of Russian disinformation media on Twitter.  The DFRLab study shows that Twitter has deliberately altered algorithms to increase the reach of the media of autocratic states. DFRLab's rating suggests that Twitter changed its algorithms around March 29, 2023. NPR, the U.S. network of public radio stations, confirmed on April 21 that Twitter had made a deliberate decision to stop filtering government accounts in Russia, China and Iran.

NPR says, “along with revoking the visibility filtering for government accounts, Twitter has also stopped its previous practice of letting researchers and developers freely access its data through a tool known as API. That means it's far more difficult for watchdogs to keep checks on the spread of government propaganda on the platform.”

Moreover, Dmitry Medvedev recently returned to Twitter and immediately insulted Ukraine. He smeared Ukraine in a post using language typical of genocidal regimes.

In his tweet titled "WHY WILL UKRAINE DISAPPEAR? BECAUSE NO ONE NEEDS IT," he called Ukraine a "Nazi regime" and Ukrainians "blood-sucking parasites," comparing them to "a threadbare quilt, torn, shaggy, and greasy." The post garnered more than 7,000 retweets and 11,000 likes. In response, people asked Musk indignantly what that meant, and why he allowed Russian officials to preach something so outrageous.

"All news is propaganda to some degree," Musk replied. "Let the people decide for themselves."

It seems to me, that the return on investment in Twitter lies in something completely different than money. I’m pretty sure it’s about 2024. I can smell totalitarian strategy a mile away.

about

Alex Alvarova is Czech-Canadian author, who lives in Boston, MA. A recognized authority in political marketing and public relations, a sought-after seminar leader, facilitator, podcaster and public speaker. In 2017 she wrote The Industry of Lies, a non-fiction work that introduces, outlines and fully supports a core concept: Russia used the 2013 presidential election in the Czech Republic as a trial run to perfect its hybrid-warfare aggression for altering the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential elections. In 2021, she published Feeding The Demons: The conquerors of America, a political thriller on bannonist behavioural BigTech propaganda. The story features the events of the American election 2016 and how the propaganda machine was established to destroy America. She wrote numerous expert articles on political marketing and algorithmic propaganda.​​ Together with her co-host, expert on social media algorithms, Josef Holy, she hosts a czech podcast called Canaries In The Net, on algorithmic propaganda and AI.