Elon Musk’s Top Priorities for Twitter are Misinfo, Transphobia

A story about how misinformation and transphobia feed each other.

by Evan Urquhart

Elon Musk’s top two priorities at Twitter are relaxing rules on misinformation and misgendering trans people, at least according to reporting in a Bloomberg story with four bylines: Kurt Wagner, Edward Ludlow, Jackie Davalos, and Davey Alba. Wow! This sure seems relevant to the Assigned Media project:

If you read our site, you probably know that misinformation and transphobia aren’t two entirely separate spheres. So we don’t think that Musk happens to have developed an interest in these two areas independently. In fact, in one of Musk’s first tweets after assuming ownership of Twitter, the billionaire posted a link to a piece of false news from a far right news source, specifically one that sought to shift blame for the attempted assassination of Nancy Pelosi by a right wing conspiracy theorist on to the LGBTQ+ community.  This suggests that Musk, for all his power and wealth, is a victim of the ongoing right wing disinformation movement, which treats people with reactionary beliefs as marks and tells them lies they’re calculated to like better than reality.

Reactionary beliefs, in other words, are the foundation on which misinformation (and, for some, full blown conspiracy theories) gets built on on. Musk’s transphobia was likely one of the things, perhaps even the key thing, that made him vulnerable to believing homophobic lies about the assailant who put Nancy Pelosi’s husband in the hospital.

Of course much misinformation directly pertains to trans people, including blatant and transparent lies, which is the raison d'être for the website you’re currently reading. Anti-trans lies and propaganda work because they feel true for people who are already predisposed to be uncomfortable with trans people’s existence. (This phenomenon was famously described by Stephen Colbert, in 2005, as the concept of “truthiness.”) For example, there’s no particular reason to believe that girls are particularly vulnerable to social contagion effects, or that the rise in young people who identify as trans men and/or transmasculine has been caused by one. However, if your gut tells you that trans men aren’t men and can’t be trusted to describe their own experience, social contagion is an explanation that sounds plausible. Even people who consider themselves skeptics that follow the evidence (and Musk seems like he might be that sort) can become marks for obvious misinfo when the real evidence points in a direction that feels wrong to them.

Unfortunately, Musk’s transphobia, and his vulnerability to lies and distortions brought on by his choice of media, are bad news for the social media platform he just bought, and especially bad news for trans people on Twitter. For all their talk of free speech as a value, the right wingers and centrists who have made it their cause célèbre have never genuinely reckoned with the fact that trans people are much more likely to be online harassment targets than online harassers. In a way, the core disagreement between left and right on this isn’t that harassment chills free speech, but a disagreement of fact on who bears the brunt of the harassment, fancy columnists or ordinary trans people. Musk seems to believe that free speech is harmed when trans people can have a voice and push back against transphobia, and that anti-trans opinions should be protected to the point of removing restraints on harassment against us. This might make sense, if the misinformation he consumed was true and trans people were responsible for the bulk of harassment on the internet. It is, however, completely false. But Musk seems to be invested in ensuring falsehoods thrive on Twitter under his leadership.