Imagine if your favorite neighborhood bar turned into a Nazi hangout. This has been a banner month for X. Last week, the social network’s built-in chatbot, Grok, became strangely obsessed with false claims about “white genocide” in South Africa—allegedly because someone made an “unauthorized modification” to its code at 3:15 in the morning. The week prior, Ye (formerly Kanye West) released a single called “Heil Hitler” on the platform. The chorus includes the line “Heil Hitler, they don’t understand the things I say on Twitter.” West has frequently posted anti-Semitic rants on the platform and, at one point back in February, said he identified as a Nazi. (Yesterday on X, West said he was “done with antisemitism,” though he has made such apologies before; in any case, the single has already been viewed tens of millions of times on X.) (…) Specifically, it validates that X has become a political weapon in his far-right activism. (To be clear, white farmers have been murdered in South Africa, which has one of the world’s highest murder rates, according to Reuters. But there is no indication of a genocide. In 2024, eight of the 26,232 murders nationwide were committed against farmers. Most murder victims there are Black.) This has been obvious to anyone using the site or paying attention to Musk’s managerial decisions. He’s reinstated thousands of banned accounts (QAnon supporters and conspiracy theorists, and at least one bona fide neo-Nazi), and the platform is engorged with low-rent outrage porn, bigoted memes, MAGA AI slop, and, well, a lot of people proudly using racial slurs, frequently to attack other people. The platform’s defenders would likely argue that X is an experiment in free-speech maximalism and that it is one of the only truly neutral zones on social media. Musk and his sycophants have constantly cited his takeover as an attempt to “solve free speech”; Joe Rogan has suggested that Musk has done just that. (This isn’t quite accurate, as X has complied with government takedown requests, temporarily suspended journalist accounts, amplified accounts that promote Musk’s worldview, and tried to censor words its owner doesn’t like: Last year, it briefly warned users who attempted to use the word cisgender in posts, after Musk said he considers it a “slur.”)
via theatlantic: What Are People Still Doing on X?
