Elon Musk is now king of the MAGA media universe | EUROtoday

Elon Musk is now unquestionably the king of MAGA media.

Tech journalist Charlie Warzel as soon as named it “the new media Upside Down”riffing on Stranger Things. Sean Illing at Vox referred to it as “the fantasy-industrial complex”. Wikipedia merely calls it the “right-wing alternative media”.

To Musk, a born-again MAGA crusader who has spent the final two years reshaping one of many world’s main social networks in his picture, this parallel universe of algorithm-aided disinformation is solely “citizen journalism” — even when his description does sound loads like conventional journalism.

And after Donald Trump’s victory this week, the MAGA media universe would possibly simply be the brand new mainstream media.

“The reality of this election was plain to see on X, while most legacy media lied relentlessly to the public,” the mega-billionaire instructed his 203m followers on Wednesday morning. “You are the media now.”

Tuesday’s end result was a testomony to the enduring energy of that ecosystem. While “legacy” newspapers and TV networks reported on Donald Trump’s prison convictions and alleged plots to overthrow the 2020 election, his cult of character has continued by a complete different world of partisan information shops, merchandise-hawking on-line influencers, and outright cults devoted to his glory.

Yet since Trump himself was booted from mainstream social networks in January 2021, there’s been nobody on the apex of this pyramid. That is, till this yr.

“It was Trump, and now it’s Musk,” says Mike Rothschild, a journalist and creator of the 2022 e-book The Storm Is Upon Us in regards to the QAnon conspiracy motion. “Musk really has taken over the role of chief s***poster, and he loves it.”

Now, with Trump on his way to the White House, Musk’s $44bn purchase of Twitter two years ago – and, experts allege, his efforts to transform it into a pro-Trump propaganda machine – give him enormous influence over the movement.

“What this does is places him principally on the elbow of the president-elect of the United States,” says Rothschild. “It places him on the levers of energy with a president who’s type of beholden to him, a minimum of for now.”

The Independent has asked Elon Musk and X for comment.

‘A one stop shop for conspiracy theories’

Long before the 2024 election, conservative journalists and activists had spent years building their own media ecosystem. Ronald Reagan’s deregulation of the TV airwaves created partisan networks like Fox Newsand new generations have followed their example in the online age.

“We’ve actually created parallel establishments,” conservative media entrepreneur Mike Cernovich instructed BuzzFeed News in 2017. “Trump supporters didn’t think they were being treated fairly or accurately by the media… and so we created the answer.”

Meanwhile, as a tech reporter for the UK’s Daily TelegraphI watched conspiracist communities and far right extremists flourish on big social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, aided by the companies’ own algorithmic recommendation engines.

When the world plunged into the Covid pandemic in 2020, these currents became a whirlpool. Diverse extremist communities coalesced under the banner of QAnon, eventually morphing into the Stop the Steal movement that stormed the US Capitol in 2021.

Trump was a conduit and an amplifier for these energies, noticing false claims that had filtered up through the network from fringe spaces such as 8chan and Telegram and then using his presidential megaphone to spread them to the whole movement.

In the early years of Trump’s rise, people had sometimes talked about “fake news” or “disinformation” in isolation, as if it was the cause of what was happening. Now it was clear that disinformation was just the symptom, the product, of a wholesale cultural split; that America had a problem with disinformation the same way a warzone has a problem with bullets.=

In the aftermath of Jan 6, most attempts to create a new online hub for the Trumpist right failed to gain momentum – including Trump’s own effort, Truth Social. What no one predicted then was that someone with enough money and motivation could simply take over an existing social network.

But then Musk bought Twitter in early 2022. Since burning down “Twitter 1.0”Musk has drastically reduced X’s content moderation apparatus, weakened safeguards against harassment, relaxed hate speech rules, effectively abolished Twitter’s old identity verification system, and declared a general amnesty for previously banned far-right accounts.

According to reportsthe social platform has also systematically failed to enforce its own rules against the far right, repeatedly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to buy adverts, get verified as “official organizations”, or earn money through its revenue sharing program.

And while X’s own revenue appears to have collapsedthe company has at least succeeded in many a Silicon Valley entrepreneur’s dream: cutting out middlemen and aggregating what was once a multi-platform supply chain.

“It’s really a one stop shop for conspiracy theories now,” says Rothschild (who is, incidentally, no relation to the famous Rothschild banking family that perennially fascinates conspiracy theorists).

“It used to be that you found something on 4chan, and you’d post it on Reddit. Then it would jump to a small Twitter account, then to the bigger accounts, and then up to Trump, and Trump would get it on Fox News. Now there doesn’t need to be any of that.”

‘The legacy media pushed a completely false reality’

Ultimately, it might be Musk’s own behavior that has had the biggest impact. With Trump’s own social media statements still relatively marginal compared to during his first term, it’s Musk’s seemingly compulsive tweeting that has filled the void.

Indeed, tweaking X’s algorithms to promote his own posts is one key way Musk has been accused of slanting the service towards Trump. At this point, it seems impossible to separate his personal opinions, or his own penchant for lurid hoaxes and borderline incitement to violencefrom X’s editorial policy.

“Today, Musk has transformed X into a political operation designed to get Trump elected at all costs. That means not only hosting election misinformation, but actively promoting it,” wrote tech journalist Casey Newton on Monday.

We don’t know yet how much this really mattered in deciding the election result. But given how many traditional media, polling and political institutions completely misjudged what would happen, many progressives are treating this as a five alarm fire.

“The Biden/Harris camp built the best phone banking and door knocking operation in history and failed to turn out 15m Biden 2020 voters,” wrote Ari Drennen of the left-wing media monitor Media Matters for America.

“Republicans built an echo chamber and ignored legacy media. Democrats need to invest in content creators and pray that it’s not too late.”

In fact, writing for The Independent on Thursdayformer Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger claimed that Musk’s alleged backchannel discussions with Vladimir Putin and alt-media influence, might make him a greater danger to the United States than the president-elect himself.

Musk naturally sees the moment differently. “For anyone… who finds this result shocking, they should reconsider where they get their information,” he said on Wednesday night. “This trend was obvious on X for months, but almost all the legacy mainstream media pushed a completely false reality. They lied to you.”

How long this position will last is anyone’s guess, given the ever-shifting nature of Trump’s coalition and the capricious winds of online popularity. “I feel that in some unspecified time in the future, most likely pretty quickly, somebody’s ego goes to run afoul of another person’s ego, and the entire thing’s going to disintegrate,” says Rothschild.

For now, there is one clear ruler of the MAGA media mirrorworld. And for perhaps the first time since 2016, it’s not Donald Trump.