From Richard Hanania, Liberals Only Censor. Musk Seeks to Lobotomize.
In theory or in an ideal world, everyone would aim for the truth or only defer to ‘trustworthy sources’ (whatever those are). But such a world has probably never existed even before the advent of social media, and certainty doesn’t in modern America.
The author’s grievances are as follow:
1. Elon Musk does not care about the truth and willingly promotes misinformation and fake news on Twitter/X, likely due to intellectual laziness on his part, despite otherwise being quite competent at business.
2. Twitter under Musk’s tenure algorithmically suppresses links, especially links to independent bloggers. Mr. Musk wants to create an echo chamber where fake news thrives and no one is able to leave. This has resulted in diminished traffic to bloggers in recent years by Twitter.
3. DOGE is incompetently run, limiting its effectiveness at its putative goal of reducing government waste.
Much of this post will focus on his first claim, which is the harshest or most serious indictment.
He writes:
Last month, a fake news account claimed, based on no evidence at all, that Zelensky had a 4% approval rating in Ukraine. This was Community Noted, which led Elon Musk to lash out and declare that the system was “being gamed” and in the process of being fixed. It was becoming increasingly difficult to see how real time factchecking could last on X when it was constantly making a fool of its owner, who has decided to take a very hands-on approach to using the platform to shape discourse in his preferred direction.
This comes off as pearl clutching. By my estimation, hardly anyone actually cares that much or are genuinely offended that Elon approvingly retweets fake news, including even egregious lies. Liberals do not care that much, nor do politicians. At worst–maybe CNN, Vox or some no-name writer for some obscure publication will call Musk out on it, but that is all. It’s not like politicians have the power to do anything (free speech is a thing). Everyone has become inured to the fact that Twitter has a lot of fake news, analogous to ants at a picnic.
It’s not as if liberals like Zelensky all that much either, and similar to attacks on Biden in 2024, find it hard to summon the enthusiasm to defend him, as much as they may dislike Putin. Zelensky’s exhortations for money, like a glorified panhandler, has become fodder for stand-up material–a niche that is hardly a bastion for conservativism. Elon may spread lies about Ukraine and Zelensky, but we’re not talking Holocaust denial, so meh…This is why it comes off as pearl clutching because this outrage is performative. People are offended at Trump and Musk because they have been instructed or habituated to find something or anything to take offense at.
Hanania is also too idealistic. He imagines a return to the Cold War era, where tweed-clad experts on TV lecture to the American people, who watch in rapt attention and are infused with these nuggets of truth that they apply in their everyday lives, and that these experts are never wrong themselves. Everything by these experts is spoken with the same verisimilitude of truth as if by God himself. The public nods and consumes the info uncritically and are better for it. There is a clear distinction between the public, who are recipients, and the media, who are the sole suppliers of information.
To the contrary, we sorta live in an era of bullshit. I find it hard to blame Musk for deferring to fake or unreliable sources when even the ‘trusted experts’ are wrong so often, and the public is increasingly incredulous of experts, and for good reason. In my response to an earlier Hanania essay about how the media is “good the honest”, the media actually has gotten many important things wrong, including spreading rumors as facts or news on tenuous or nonexistent evidence. Social networks have used the pretext of expertise, even when said experts are wrong or biased, to justify censorship.
For example, during Covid, it was promised that social distancing and masks would ‘flatten the curve’ and bring about the swift end to the pandemic, which it hadn’t. Or that the vaccines would stop the spread of Covid, which they evidently didn’t as shown by subsequent Covid-variant surges worldwide. The vaccinated were still required to wear masks and to socially distance, as they could spread disease, against the media and expertise assurances earlier. This is just Covid; there are tons of others, like promises of “inflation being transitory” in early 2021, which it also wasn’t.
Moreover, compared to the ’60s, attention spans are hopelessly fragmented by social media, smart phones, and micro-niches. Except for maybe the Superbowl, the days of entire swaths of the country tuning to networks such as CBS or ABC for their daily dose of requisite knowledge, are long over. Instead of everyone being lectured by the same talking heads, we can seek out our own experts, whether it’s health advice or political commentary. A random podcaster is now as much of a supplier of information or can lay claim to any authority or truth as any established media person or credentialed intellectual.
Regarding Hanania’s claim of Elon Musk being an intellectually unserious person, it’s a bit rich that this is from the same person who says Shakespeare is overrated or could write better prose than Shakespeare. If anything, this is the sort of thing an unserious person would say. What ought Mr. Musk be doing or saying instead? What great intellectual insights has Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg proffered lately? If “mosquito nets for Africa and the internet will be used worldwide” constitutes serious intellectual thought or inquiry by a billionaire, then I am not impressed. At least cat turd is not trying to take itself too seriously.
I don’t need to turn to some overrated person, either a billionaire or an intellectual for the answers, who is likely just as clueless as anyone else or is trying to mislead me. Look how many experts, for example, predicted since 2008 that Tesla would go bankrupt or its stock would go to zero. I can thus understand why Elon similarly discounts credentialed experts, instead focusing his intellectual energy on company-specific matters, and less energy if a story is true or not. This on occasion leads to him retweeting fake or wrong stuff, but because the stakes are so small and no one cares that much, so what.
My own observation has shown that nobodies/anons, like on Twitter or 4chan, are more accurate or insightful compared to ‘esteemed experts’, who have have reputations and careers to protect, whereas anons are more disinhibited. The replication crisis, or how 20 years of Alzheimer’s research has been derailed by academic fraud, shows how even many credentialed experts are at the same level of astrologers as far as truth-seeking is concerned.
On February 27th, 2025, just two weeks ago, Hanania put out a piece defending Elon in spite of his flaws:
Some people judge individuals by how much they agree with their politics. In that sense, Musk is probably closer to me than over 95% of the public. Yet truth, good faith discourse, and a public square where members of an educated elite class all live in the same reality are goods for their own sake. It’s not impossible for me to imagine we get a world where thanks to Musk’s actions we achieve smaller government by default, because the public square has become so flooded by nonsense that there’s no such thing as an intelligentsia to speak of, which means that socialists, environmentalists, the civil rights lobby, and other groups with bad ideas aren’t able to enact them.
Such optimism contrasts sharply with the harsh tone of his latest article, in which those same flaws are now held against Musk as an indictment on his character.
This leads me to think Hanania is trying to preempt a possible vibe shift in which the online-right and mainstream Republicans turn against Musk, or an outcome in which DOGE crashes and burns and Elon is ousted. So he can point to this article as having predicted it. But conversely, if DOGE succeeds, he can point to his earlier article. This leads me to believe that the author does not care so much that Elon is spreading fake news, but instead is trying to cover a scenario in which this becomes a bigger problem, like DOGE failing or X/Twitter losing popularity.
I agree though that DOGE will not lead to meaningful cuts in government spending. The elephant in the room here is healthcare spending, which no one wants to touch. Too many people are drawing from public resources to treat chronic diseases due to age, lifestyles or other factors. There will be no reduction of any of the major security agencies, like the DHS or the FBI.
It’s also worth noting that pundits like Hanania, Matthew Yglesias, or Trace Woodgrains, who can consistently compose perfectly-written 2000-word policy pieces or incisive policy analysis at a whim on X/Twitter and are well-read on a wide range of topics, are outliers even among the intellectual-sphere. We’re talking maybe fifty or so individuals who are comparable to them or are capable of those feats, on a site with half a billion users. If that is the yardstick of what constitutes of being a good public intellectual, then the vast majority of intellectuals will fall short. Under such a grading rubric, most people are going to come off as appearing shallow, tech billionaires included, as world-class erudition is possibly even a rarer distinction than being a billionaire.
Finally, regarding Twitter censoring or suppressing links, this is true to some extent, but it predates Musk, as shown by the Twitter Files, in which the source code showed that links have always been penalized. I can attest that Twitter has downranked links well before Musk was involved. Additionally, link posts tend to perform poorly, not only due to any algorithmic penalties, but also because of how they are written. They often use passive language, such as “I wrote this…,” and include weak or non-existent calls to action, like “…please click/read…” There is no strong incentive for the reader–who is already flooded with stories from the accounts they follow on Twitter–to feel compelled to click the link out of the hundreds of other tweets competing for his or her attention. The image card used for the link preview is similarly uninspiring, either being AI-generated or generic and not evoking any sense of awe or curiosity to click the link. This is the writer’s fault for not adequately ‘selling’ the work.
About the claim of writers being censored, I also disagree. If Substack articles are performing worse, it’s likely instead because the Substack novelty factor has worn off, than censorship on Musk’s part. Substack, despite tons of hype in 2021-2023, is pretty much the same as any other blogging platform, except the articles tend to be wordier. But people on Twitter typically want ‘hot takes’ or nuggets of info, not long essays, and are probably inclined to ignore Substack links for this reason.