Mooretoons

The richest man — or the second, depending on which list you read — has been busy, using his wealth and power to make things worse for everyone else. No surprise there. Twitter has become a more dysfunctional shit show than it ever has been. Recently, however, Elon cranked the deterioration into overgear when he approved and encouraged an antisemitic hashtag campaign against the Anti Defamation League, leading to a rise in hateful imagery and rhetoric against Jews. The ADL has been exposing hate speech from all across the political spectrum for years (decades), but it became particularly toxic after Elon welcomed back the far right accounts banned by the previous leadership and then gutted the staffing required to monitor their abuses. Elon now threatens to sue the ADL for defamation and blames them for driving away advertisers.

As said, Twitter has always had problems. Elon’s hopes for running financial services through X (aka, Twitter) are threatened by opposition from federal and state banking regulators over complicity in Saudi human rights abuses when Jack Dorsey ran the company. A recent lawsuit alleges Twitter was infiltrated by Saudi agents posing as employees who gathered the private data of Saudi critics and rights activists. Even after the data breach was exposed, the company continued to approve requests by the Saudi government for this information, leading to imprisonment and torture of Saudi citizens and in some cases their execution. Under Elon, the Saudi regime is the second largest investor, and the banking regulators argue there is no reason to think he cares about the privacy or human rights of the people using his platform.

The news that Elon blocked Ukraine usage of Starlink satellite systems to conduct an attack on Russian warships this year is … just mind blowing. The US State Department response to a situation that one might reasonably conclude is treasonous has been tepid. Secretary of State Antony Blinken seems reluctant to criticize Space X or Elon for fear of losing access to StarLink’s network of satellites which the US and Ukraine rely on to coordinate Ukraine’s military strategy and intelligence gathering. Fair enough, I suppose. I don’t expect Blinken to pound a podium demanding Elon’s head, but I would like to think that behind the scenes they are looking into it.