Office Hours: Musk's racism

Friends,

After Scott Adams, the creator of “Dilbert,” called Black people a “hate group” and said, “I don’t want to have anything to do with them” and that white people should “get the hell away from Black people,” media outlets have dropped his comic strip.

In response, last Sunday Twitter chief Elon Musk blasted the media as being “racist against whites and Asians.” He offered no criticism of Adams’s comments.

Elon Musk @elonmusk

@monitoringbias For a *very* long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians. Same thing happened with elite colleges & high schools in America. Maybe they can try not being racist.

Later, Musk agreed with a tweet that said “Adams’ comments weren’t good” but “there’s an element of truth” to them. Musk then suggested that media organizations promote a “false narrative” by giving more coverage to unarmed Black victims of police violence than they do to unarmed white victims of police violence.

Since Musk took over Twitter in October, the platform has seen a spike in virulently racist slurs. In November, Musk met with leaders of civil rights groups to assure them that he would not reinstate banned Twitter accounts until he established a clear process for doing so, and that representatives from civil rights groups would be included on a content moderation council to advise Twitter on these policies.

But Musk never formed the content moderation council. Instead, he reinstated numerous banned accounts, including those of neo-Nazis and others previously banned for hate speech.

Meanwhile, the public is being swamped with Musk tweets. When a tweet that he posted during the Super Bowl failed to achieve as much engagement as a tweet from President Joe Biden, Musk demanded that Twitter staff change its algorithm to artificially inflate Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000. Many people who have not chosen to follow Musk are being served his tweets in their feed through the “For you” tab of the app’s homepage.

In sum, the richest person in the world used part of his fortune to buy one of the world’s largest media platforms, then reinstated previously banned neo-Nazis and peddlers of hate speech, then allegedly changed its algorithms to make his posts into the platform’s most popular, and is now defending a racist cartoonist and criticizing the media as being racist against white people.

So today’s Office Hours question (and poll): What, if anything, should be done about this? (As usual, I’ll chime in later today.)