A report by The New York Times on Elon Musk’s fervent support for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign includes a bombshell detail that undermines right-wingers’ conspiratorial claims about Hunter Biden and anti-conservative bias on social media.
Conservatives have been kvetching for years about so-called collusion by the federal government with Big Tech, which they baselessly claim was a factor in Trump’s loss in 2020. In Republicans’ telling, the internal choices of some social media companies to moderate conspiratorial content about data — some of it pornographic — dubiously retrieved from an old Hunter Biden laptop amounts to a full-blown conspiracy.
Never mind that this purported government collusion would have occurred under the Trump administration — right-wingers have gone all in on the bogus claim, which has been promoted by Elon Musk.
But according to the Times, the Trump campaign and Musk’s social platform, X, recently engaged in conduct remarkably similar to what conservatives have been crying about for years. Per the report:
The relationship has proved significant in other ways. After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.
The Times’ anecdote involves independent journalist Ken Klippenstein’s controversial suspension from X after he shared a link to his website, where he had published hacked opposition research that the Trump campaign compiled on JD Vance, now Trump’s running mate. (The Times’ report has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News.)
Because we’re talking about Republicans here, and they’ve already shown their rank hypocrisy when it comes to Musk’s platform, I’m certain that the conservatives controlling the House won’t be holding any hearings on Musk and Trump, as they did to promote bogus allegations about Hunter Biden’s laptop. But what the Times is reporting is far more egregious. Twitter in 2020 was not in the bag for any particular candidate. Musk’s X, on the other hand, is an unmistakably pro-Trump propaganda outlet operated by a bigoted megalomaniac. And the Times appears to have just revealed a way that Musk and company are manipulating the platform to help Trump win.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. Recommended
