How Elon Musk got the anti-journalism weapon he always wanted

I’ve been a tech journalist for more than a decade, and during that time, one person has remained a central figure throughout my career: Elon Musk. He’s been celebrated, scrutinized and hated. I used to think he might bring some positive changes to the world. I now think he’s one of the worst influences on culture and politics you could imagine.

To explain: When I started as a tech journalist, many observers lauded him as an innovator. He spoke relatively eloquently about the problems of the future, and he appeared to be taking big swings to change the world around us. He led a successful electric car company — with some help from the taxpayer — and we needed popular, efficient electric cars to beat climate change. He was also changing space travel with his rocket company SpaceX.

He promised a lot more — remember mass-scale hyperloop? — but we’d soon learn he wouldn’t deliver on a lot of what he promised. Regardless, he was someone Americans generally thought of in a positive light.

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That’s why I started reaching out to him. In 2017, we had a few conversations over email. I also had some questions for him for an article I was writing, and he gave me a quote for the article.

But the press was becoming more critical of Musk around that time, and he started lashing out against the media. In 2018, he proposed launching a website called “Pravduh” where the credibility of journalists and media outlets could be rated.

I found this idea concerning, because I don’t like the idea of some manic billionaire being the arbiter of which media outlets and journalists people should trust. I asked him about the idea and how it might all work. We discussed it quite a bit, and Musk told me his respect for the press was “extremely low” at that point and all they wanted to do was “trash” him. He said journalists would lose their relevance “entirely” unless they “got their act together.”

“Pravduh” fizzled. But since then, of course, Musk has purchased Twitter (now officially “X”). As owner, Musk has trashed media outlets and journalists, banned journalists, made verification on the platform almost meaningless and elevated the influence of right-wing trolls. In a way, Musk now has a version of “Pravduh.” He has the weapon he always wanted to use against the press.

Meanwhile, it's become extremely difficult to know what’s valid and generally follow the news on Twitter since he took over.

Matthew Baum, a professor of global communications at Harvard University, tells Raw Story that he’s not really using Twitter anymore since Musk took over. Neither are a lot of his colleagues.

“The quality of discourse on Twitter was never consistently wonderful, but it’s less wonderful now,” Baum says.

Baum says Musk seems to be following his “personal whims” as the head of Twitter and will attack and/or ban anyone he doesn’t care for at that moment. He says Twitter had problems with dealing with misinformation and disinformation before, but it’s gotten a lot worse since Musk took over.

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“It’s a problem. Basically, it’s kind of been open season for the fringes of Twitter. There’s a lot of crazy floating around there,” he says.

Since Musk isn’t a fan of the media, he often encourages non-journalists to produce news content. He supports “citizen journalism,” which isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it is a difficult thing to actually do well. Furthermore, it would seem the kind of “citizen journalism” he would want would largely be created by right-wing trolls with whom he agrees.

“Societally, we have a huge problem, in terms of discerning credible vs. non-credible information,” Baum says. “The problem with this notion of ‘citizen journalism’ is that there are no particular norms or values or training or means of discerning between the good quality information and the bad quality information.”

Baum says citizen journalism can be done well, but it’s more often not done well. It certainly doesn’t represent a viable alternative to the mainstream media, he says. We’ve also very clearly seen on Twitter that a lot of people who try to do it aren’t just trying to break legitimate news but are pushing an agenda and might take things out of context or disseminate false information.

Musk has caused chaos in the world of journalism, since it’s where so many journalists share their content, follow the news and interact with each other. It seems that’s something he’s happy to do.

With Twitter as his weapon, he can disrupt the journalism community and elevate extremists he agrees with. Twitter is not even close to the largest social media platform, but it’s an influential and important one, especially for those in journalism and who want to follow news developments. Alternatives such as Mastodon, Bluesky and even Threads have attempted to supplant it, to no avail — at least not yet, as many journalists and news organizations continue to hold out hope Twitter will, at some point, again feel more like Twitter.

Musk is certainly well aware of that.