Elon Musk is in the news again. The world’s richest man was awarded a new $1 trillion pay package by the Tesla board of directors, and Sky News published details of what they claim is the political right-wing bias that Musk’s very own social media platform appears to have developed since he bought it three years ago. Musk has become the actual living embodiment of the incredibly wealthy evil genius depicted in so many Hollywood films, although genius isn’t perhaps the right word. Nut job would be a better choice.
First, the pay package. He will probably never see all of it. The board have set various extremely ambitious milestones for him that need to be achieved before he’ll be in line for a trillion dollars. It’s doubtful Tesla will ever make twenty million vehicles a year, for example. They are rapidly losing market share in Europe and falling behind the Chinese company BYD, which has now overtaken Tesla as the largest EV maker, and the VW group.
BYD's range of cars is wider, better quality, more innovative, and cheaper. But although Musk will never see the massive pay package, what it tells us is how the board views Musk. They actually think he’s a genius worth that incredible amount of money. He’s an idiot, and they are out of their minds. Tesla isn’t even that profitable. It’s a cult.
Tesla's market capitalisation is close to $1.5 trillion, six times more than Toyota, although Toyota has over three times as much revenue as Tesla and nearly five times the profit! Anyone who puts faith in Musk deserves all they get. The Tesla bubble will soon burst.
One of the reasons Tesla has fallen out of favour in Europe is Musk's fascination with extreme right-wing politics. He's encouraging the Neo fascist AfD in Germany and supports Tommy Robinson with his legal costs. He uses Twitter (I refuse to call it X) as his own personal messaging service to spread right-wing tropes and outright lies. He is the biggest disseminator of fake news on the platform.
Sky News
Sky News has done us all a favour by conducting serious research into bias on Twitter, which I confess I don’t use anymore. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can read it HERE. What the validated research shows is that Twitter has become a megaphone for far-right messaging, influencing millions of users all over the world.
A team at Sky created nine fake UK accounts. Three were right-wing, three left-wing and three neutral. Over a two-week period in May, Twitter fed them various posts from 22,000 accounts. These were collected twice a day, eventually giving them a database of 90,000 posts. Academics were then employed to categorise the political leanings of around 6,000 accounts, which enabled an analysis of how Twitter decided which posts the users saw on their feed.
The 6000 accounts were responsible for about two-thirds of the posts seen by the nine fakes created by Sky. Of that number, about 60% came from right-wing accounts and one-third from left-wing accounts. Only 6% of posts were non-partisan or neutral.
Now for the results. The fake left-wing accounts were seeing left and right-leaning posts almost equally while the neutrals saw twice as much right-wing content as left-wing. The fake right-wing accounts were shown just 14% of left-leaning posts. So, Sky concluded that “right-wing content was shown most prominently, regardless of users' political leaning.”
To show how this works in practice, they looked at and compared the 33 most prominent British politicians in the dataset from across the political spectrum against how much those politicians were posting during the two-week period they were collecting data.
"You might expect people who tweet more to show up in feeds more - especially if they have similar levels of engagement with their content. But we found some voices were more prominently shown to our users, even when they posted less."
For example, Kemi Badenoch's posts provided 4% of all the posts from the 33 politicians during the two weeks, and she accounted for 3% of the posts that Twitter's algorithm chose to show the nine users. In other words, about the same balance.
But Rupert Lowe, the former Reform UK MP and now an independent, and a favourite of Musk's, was treated differently. While his posts only made up 6% of the total posts produced - a bit more than Badenoch - they provided almost a quarter of the posts sent to the nine fake users!
To compare this with how left-wing voices were treated, they looked at George Galloway, who was tweeting the most of any of the 33 politicians, fully 13% of the total. But his posts only made up 3% of the posts sent to Sky's new users, even though Galloway has many more followers than Lowe, and their posts receive similar levels of engagement.
This is how it works. Musk is using Twitter to boost the far-right.
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey was asked to comment, and he said the government isn't taking Elon Musk's role in fuelling division in Britain seriously enough. "He's interfering in the free speech of our country and that's why I think we should get a lot more serious and try to push back very hard," he told Sky News.
"We should be far more alarmed than people seem to be. This is impacting our politics, impacting people's views, and I think it's toxic to a good democracy."
The origins of social media
When Mark Zuckerberg and his friends got the idea for Facebook, it was as a medium for keeping in touch with people's own social circle. You would be able to find out what your mates were up to and post things about what you were doing. A social circle might involve a few dozen people. The messages passed between you were the sort of stuff you might say in the pub.
Some of it might have been offensive, even racist, but it was between yourselves. The idea quickly took off, and when celebrities discovered they could communicate with their fans (i.e. people they didn’t necessarily know), the notion of social media replacing orthodox media began.
There was a long period in the early years when Facebook was figuring out how to monetise itself, and the “like” button was invented, surely the worst invention since the atom bomb. The like button allowed the platform to build a detailed picture of you, your likes and dislikes and what made you tick. I remember claims that they know you better and more deeply than your own mother.
In this way, they could feed you more of the stuff you liked, and push you further down the rabbit hole. More to the monetising point, they could sell advertising directed at specific groups, elderly left-handed barbers who liked gardening and live in Cornwall, for example.
Suddenly, the platforms started to get rich. Politicians and influencers piled in and grew their followers to enrich themselves by posting clickbait. Malicious actors employed people to create accounts to repost stuff, and ‘bots’ became a thing. Totally fake stories started to ‘go viral’, and we are now in the position where you never really know if you’re reading the truth or not.
Men like Elon Musk spend fortunes to own these platforms, not for altruistic reasons but to make money and peddle influence. Everyone is posting or reposting every day so there is a vast excess of stories, far more than you can read, and the platform decides what you see, not you.
This is of huge interest to men like Elon Musk. And now it seems we know how the algorithm which decides what you see on Twitter actually works.
It's absolutely insidious and really needs some control.
