In less than a year, Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter—and its sudden leniency toward right-wing hate and misinformation—has become one of the most pressing concerns for Democrats and progressives heading into the New Year. But despite stoking widespread outrage on a near-daily basis, Musk still hardly appears to be on the president’s radar.
On Sunday, Semafor’s Max Tani reported that the administration does not view the app as “a vital part of any political strategy that reaches beyond the chattering classes,” with one former White House official calling the company an “afterthought.” Tani also noted that the White House views Twitter as having two main use cases: “Selling its message to journalists and other influential figures” and “encouraging friendly activists to put pressure on those elite voices.”
“There’s a crowd within the White House that cares about disinformation and thinks it’s a major problem for Democrats narrowly and democracy more broadly,” a Biden official told Tani of Musk’s fuzzy moderation policies. “But it’s probably a minority.”
The report came just hours after the Tesla CEO openly angled to score points with the far-right on two fronts, tweeting, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” Musk later claimed to be defending “the future of civilization,” and said that “the woke mind virus” must be “defeated or nothing else matters.” The attack on Anthony Fauci, who has led the federal response to COVID-19 since the pandemic’s inception, stems from Musk’s belief that the Biden administration’s chief medical adviser “lied under oath” and “arguably contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.” Musk has said that Fauci will be among the next targets of the “Twitter Files,” a series of internal company documents assailing Twitter’s previous administration for supposedly persecuting conservatives.
However, the billionaire appears most vexed by the economic disturbances that could arise if pandemic mitigation measures are reinstated. On Monday, he expressed sympathy with a tweet that claimed unvaccinated people “aren’t dying,” to which Musk replied, “Somehow, the nation of Sweden is fine.” (While the European country practiced a more laissez-faire approach to COVID than some of its peer nations, Sweden has a slightly higher vaccination rate, 74%, than the US.)
Needless to say, reactions to Musk’s anti-Fauci comments fell along partisan lines, attracting praise from the likes of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Senator Rand Paul, while drawing rebukes from Senator Amy Klobuchar, Representative Dean Phillips, and other Democrats.
On Sunday night, Musk took his war against the “woke mind virus” onstage, appearing alongside comedian Dave Chappelle at a San Francisco club, where the tech magnate was greeted with raucous boos from the crowd for several minutes straight. Chappelle, whose constant derision of trans and nonbinary people has netted him legions of right-wing fans, responded to the boos by mocking the wallets of attendees. “All these people that are booing, I’m just pointing out the obvious—they have terrible seats in the stadium,” the comedian said in a video of the performance shared online. Later, Musk insisted that his comedy cameo was actually a hit. “Technically, it was 90% cheers & 10% boos (except during quiet periods), but, still, that’s a lot of boos, which is a first for me in real life (frequent on Twitter),” he tweeted, adding that all the jeers came from “unhinged [San Francisco] leftists.”
As for Twitter itself, Musk’s rocky tenure at the company is approaching yet another experimental phase. On Monday, Musk said that the platform will be embracing longer-form writing by increasing the character limit for tweets from 280 to 4,000. Additionally, the latest version of the company’s disastrous Twitter Blue project, a monthly subscription service that allows any user to buy a verification checkmark, relaunched this week with a slight wrinkle aimed at Apple users: The service will cost $8 a month on Twitter’s web client and $11 a month if purchased in-app on iOS, the latter of which is subject to Apple’s 30% commission on many of its in-app purchases––[a fee](https://www.npr.org/2022/11/29/1139765251/elon-musk-is-taking-issue-with-the-app-store-but-apple-may-have-the-last-word#:~:text=Musk tweeted%2C quote%2C “did,debated for many%2C many years.){: target=”_blank”} that Musk has slammed as the “Apple tax.”
