It’s time to boycott TwiXter!
When Elon Musk took over Twitter, I stopped using my account and deleted the application.
The reason was simple: before this transaction, Elon Musk had displayed unethical behavior and refused to respect the regulations in his handling of the Tesla shares: lack of transparency, the Trump media audit and fraud and many others. He was forced to relinquish his Chairman role in Tesla by the SEC as early as 2018. [1]
Elon Musk has violated a lot of the social contract, and its basis of trust, with employees, with investors, suppliers, regulators, and other parts of his ecosystem. He is starting to feel the repercussions of having destroyed the ethical assumptions that underlie many of those relationships, writes ethics professor JS Nelson. [2]
The acquisition of Twitter made no sense unless…
The underlying value of Twitter was way below the $ 45 billion Elon Musk personally paid for Twitter. In late 2023, a leaked memo from the social media platform showed that X valued itself at less than half its initial value — just $19 billion. Around the same time, Fidelity, the mutual fund giant that helped Musk purchase X, marked down the value of its shares in the privately held company even more, putting its value somewhere between $15 and $16 billion.
This lack of ethics was confirmed when the Tesla CEO massive $56 billion pay package was approved by shareholders during the company’s annual meeting in June 2024. “Hot damn, I love you guys,” Musk said to a cheering room of Tesla shareholders and employees minutes after his pay package was approved. This was the most massive extorsion of shareholder value. Did Elon Musk actually vote his shares to approve its pay package? In any event, he concluded that regulation in California was too stringent, and moved Tesla to … Texas. Last quarter, its net income decreased by 48%.
His actions speak for themselves: firing thousands of employees, reinstating Donald Trump and white supremacists, ditching content moderation rules and banning journalists from the New York Times or CNN.
Musk and the Neuralink team achieved this feat by eschewing nearly every norm of medical science. In doing so, they challenged the notion that adherence to these norms is the only path to legitimate discoveries. They demonstrated that valid science is possible in a way that is foreign, unrecognizable, and entirely uncomfortable to most scientists.[3]
Twisting X into a propaganda machine for Donald Trump
After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — his account was permanently suspended due to the risk of further incitement of violence. [4]
The objective of Elon Musk has always been to use Twitter for personal and political reasons. Elon Musk announced his support to Donald Trump. In July 2024 Elon Musk said he is committing around $45 million a month to a New Pro-Trump Super PAC, breaking any possible neutrality of the non-“social media”.
Mr. Musk has criticized a Brazilian Supreme court judge, Alexandre de Moraes- one of his most frequent targets- for blocking hundreds of accounts who were threatening Brazilian democracy, most of them from the far right and former President Jair Bolsonaro. Eventually, he closed his local office.
Immediately afterwards, Elon Musk “interviewed” the former President on a radio channel he had created making himself his master’s voice. By doing so, he joined Trumpist Fox News, without any consideration of the possible consequences on his other businesses, primarily the ailing Tesla or the risks that it might violate the campaign rules. It was anything but an interview and TwiXter only has itself to blame for the glitches that delayed it by 40 minutes. Elon Musk himself presented it as a “conversation” while it was in fact a complacent chat. “It is essential that you win for the sake of the country”[5]
That event sealed what is more than a support, but an alliance that binds Elon Musk to Donald Trump, making it a major source of propaganda for the Republican candidate.
Time to Boycott TwiXter?
The transformation of X into a political activist for Donald Trump is actually a serious twisting of what a social media should be and raises serious questions about the necessity to start boycotting (or at the minimum distancing from) TwiXter.
Messaging (let alone supporting) X has become a political act. This makes it anything but a neutral exchange. This raises questions on the responsibility participants on TwiXter take by using the platform.
It becomes particularly acute for the public sector, and governments who use it to convey their information and message: they inevitably endorse Elon Musk and must ask themselves the question of their own political and social responsibility.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X also sued a global advertising alliance and several major companies, including Mars and CVS Health, accusing them of unlawfully conspiring to boycott the site and causing it to lose revenue.[6]
Other social media are readily available to provide a non-political forum for information and dialogue without feeding the hand of a man who, by all measures, has aligned himself with highly questionable “alliances”.
The laundry list of lawsuits against Elon Musk and his companies continues to grow — ranging from sexual harassment complaints to massive job cuts, stock manipulation and bloated pay packages.[7]
The European Union brought its first charges under a new social media law, accusing Elon Musk’s X of violating the regulation by deceiving users and not living up to transparency requirements. “It negatively affects users’ ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content they interact with,” the commission wrote in its findings. “There is evidence of motivated malicious actors abusing the ‘verified account’ to deceive users.”[8]
Musk declared that “Civil war is inevitable in the United Kingdom.” He didn’t delete that one after the fact, nor did he take down his quote-tweet of the falsehood that “gangs of armed & masked Muslim men are rampaging through cities,” adding only his limp, constant refrain that X’s Community Notes feature is good at countering misinformation. (It demonstrably isn’t.)[9]
As Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian on August 16 put it :” Elon Musk should face justice for his role in England far right riots. It was him , on his own X account, who falsely claimed that British Prime Minister Keir Stamer planned to create “detainment camps” for rioters in the Falkland Islands quoting the leader of the ultra-far right and inflamed the situation by tweeting that civil war was inevitable…He is surely the global ‘s most significant figure with the world’s largest megaphone…A battle to defeat him is inevitable — and it must be won. “
Musk and Trump are both a threat to democracy: we cannot ignore our personal and institutional responsibility in supporting this unholy alliance.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/09/29/653014733/elon-musk-settles-with-sec-agrees-to-step-down-as-tesla-chairman#:~:text=Under%20the%20terms%20of%20the,as%20chairman%20within%2045%20days.
[2] https://hls.harvard.edu/today/the-business-ethics-of-elon-musk-tesla-twitter-and-the-tech-industry/
[3] https://www.statnews.com/2024/07/08/neuralink-elon-musk-scientific-ethics-brain-computer-interface/
[4] https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzWjFzRMQNA
[6] https://www.reuters.com/legal/musks-x-accuses-advertisers-illegal-boycott-new-lawsuit-2024-08-06/#:~:text=Aug%206%20(Reuters)%20%2D%20Elon,causing%20it%20to%20lose%20revenue.
[7] https://www.livemint.com/companies/people/elon-musk-vs-lawsuits-all-major-legal-battles-facing-the-tech-billionaire-and-his-companies-tesla-spacex-twitter-x-11718253676779.html#:~:text=The%20laundry%20list%20of%20lawsuits,manipulation%20and%20bloated%20pay%20packages.
[8] https://www.npr.org/2024/07/12/g-s1-9944/eu-takes-elon-musks-x-to-court-over-blue-checks-and-ads
[9] https://slate.com/technology/2024/08/elon-musk-donald-trump-twitter-spaces-world-threat.html
