Elon Musk Is Debasing American Society

He’s not just enabling trolls; he’s personally endorsing their posts.

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter and changed its name to X, he promptly went about stripping its capacity for content moderation, reinstating extremist accounts, and boosting the reach and visibility of the worst trolls. I have heard many blithe rationalizations of the pragmatic and even salutary benefits of “knowing what people really think.” But the pervasiveness and normalization of what was, until very recently, niche and stigmatized bigotry has been astonishing to witness. Although there was plenty of racism on the internet during Trump’s first and second campaigns, it wasn’t this ubiquitous on mainstream networks such as Twitter. On Musk’s X, the racism has now become so relentless and self-confident that it amounts to a genuine qualitative difference.

“If I had to summarize the intent of X’s algorithm at this point, it would be twofold,” Sam Harris remarked this week on his Making Sense podcast. “The first is to make Elon even more famous than he is. And the second is to make every white user of the platform more racist. If you could pipe the X algorithm into your brain through Neuralink, I think you’d probably jump off the table and go out and buy a Cybertruck and then join a white-supremacist militia. That’s the vibe I get when I spend a few minutes scrolling the homepage.”