It sure feels like Elon turned up the racism dial last month

Is Elon vibe-tampering?

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Greetings from Read Max HQ! In today’s newsletter, a discussion of the “new vibe” on Twitter and its possible sources.

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Is Elon vibe tampering?

Way back in July, I wrote a newsletter that was in part about the damaging habit of viewing the state of a presidential election through the lens of Twitter. The GMU economist Tyler Cowen had recently written a blog post about “the changes in vibes,” in which he attempted to backfill a narrative to explain why Trump, a “highly vulnerable, defeated President, facing numerous legal charges and indeed an actual felony conviction… now stands as a clear favorite in the next election.” My sense was that Cowen was drawing a bit too heavily on Twitter to develop his understanding of what the “vibes” actually were, and Twitter is (as I wrote at the time, sorry to quote myself):

a dangerous place to assess sentiment (or “vibes”) not just because it’s a very skewed sample of the population but because Twitter is only vibe shifts. It is the most volatile social network more or less by design and function; on Twitter, it is always already so over, and we are always already so back.

As it happened, Joe Biden stepped aside for Kamala Harris a few days later, and suddenly Trump was no longer a clear favorite in the next election. Had the vibes shifted again? Or perhaps they had never shifted at all in the first place? Based on weighted polling averages, the race has remained remarkably stable and remarkably close, likely to come down to the side of the bed a few thousand voters in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and/or Arizona wake up on. (The same could have been said about the Biden-Trump matchup, give or take a few tipping-point states.)

And yet, on Twitter, and consequently among American national political media, the vibes have been as volatile as ever. We’re currently in the midst of a violent vibe shift in favor of Harris in the wake of Wednesday night’s debate, but for two or three weeks prior, the vibes had shifted in Trump’s favor. Some of this was due to actual incidents happening in the world--RFK Jr. dropping out of the race--and some of it was about Harris failing to develop or solidify a consistent and sizable lead over Trump in the polls after the Democratic National Convention.

But another thing that was going on was that Twitter had gotten, suddenly, really fucking racist. I’ve been pretty used to racism online, and specifically to racism on Elon’s Twitter, but I’ve been taken aback its increased volume and intricate weirdness--the once minor thrum of Muskian reaction about IQs and immigration and now a deafening babble. A whole new cast of verified pseuds I’ve never heard of--”Wayne Burkett”? “Jeremy Kauffman”?--with tens of thousands of followers suddenly inescapable, their dull little provocations filling up my FYP.

For a while in August my For You list got seized with an advanced brand of anti-Indian racism, I believe of Canadian origin, which for whatever reason has become particularly trendy among blue-check laser-eyes guys. Then the story of “Venezuelan gangs” taking over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colo. became inescapable. There was also this bizarre episode where a payroll startup (a payroll startup!) was giving out Twitter badges to a bunch of giggly anime-PFP racists for, I guess, publicity reasons?

And now, this week, we’ve got the wildly racist meme-fable about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, which leapt from Twitter fantasy to national news when Donald Trump referenced it during the debate.

What, precisely, is going on here? I’m not a conspiracy theorist,¹ and I don’t really believe this,² but … is it possible that Elon Musk has been turning up the racism dial? Not literally,³ but: Consider that Musk endorsed Trump at the top, just before Biden gave up in favor of Harris. This is where the vibes come in: Musk is famously volatile and impatient, highly susceptible to vibe shifts and sensitive to insults. He’s also addicted to Twitter and in charge of it. He may have wanted to do something about the fact that the tenor of his website had shifted so notable toward Harris, and his disastrous interview with Trump didn’t change anything. He claims to believe that the previous Twitter administration had engaged in all kinds of political-algorithmic tampering, which would give him both the inspiration and the moral justification for (say) tweaking sorting weights such that tweets on Trump-favoring issues like immigration got more play, which would also naturally increase the visibility of Twitter’s many weird blue-check racists.⁴

Now, look, I feel sort of embarrassed to propose such a straightforwardly basic-bitch conspiracy theory about platform manipulation. It makes me feel like a resistance lib or a free-speech guy screaming about shadow banning, or whatever. There are a number of much better and more rigorous explanation for my personally observed increase in weird racism on Twitter: It’s very difficult to say anything comprehensive or objective about “what’s happening” on Twitter since the Musk takeover and the consequent TikTokization of its design and function around the “For You” algorithmic feeds. At basically any point in time over the last two years, you can find someone claiming that Twitter had suddenly become more racist. (And indeed Musk has already “turned up the racism dial” on the site⁵ simply by not actually bothering to enforce any rules violations about racism, and also by being creepy and racist himself.)

It’s very possible that their, and my, experience is a function of Twitter’s extremely sensitive FYP algorithm. Linger or even click on a tweet from a professionally racist account (even a non-racist one!) and the FYP vibe will shift very quickly. (This is, indeed, why Musk’s Twitter in particular is not a great medium through which to assess vibes.)

But also … come on. Right? Anecdotally, I am not the only person to have noticed a marked and sudden uptick in racism over the past month, and the conditions have been exactly right. If you’re in charge of the vibe shift website, why wouldn’t you try to engineer some vibe shifts yourself?

The irony, I guess, is that (as wrote re: Cowen) it’s not at all clear to me that the prevailing Twitter vibe can be a useful lever for political action. It might make you feel better that the website you’re addicted to reflect your preferences, but that’s not the same thing as the world doing so. Remember 2016?

1. I am.

2. I kind of do.

3. Basically literally.

4. I want to be clear that this is a baseless and evidence-free conspiracy theory that I am sharing with the sophisticated consumers of Read Max in the spirit of “newsletter fun,” and if any portion of it gets shared in earnestness by or challenged in any kind of rigorous way, I will disavow it immediately and claim that I have been joking the whole time. But I basically believe it.

5. Perhaps what I was really observing wasn’t a “more racist” Twitter, but a brief interregnum during which the right-wing media machine was left flat-footed by the Biden-Harris switch, and the platform was open to Harris-favorable vibes. My experience of “increased racism” was simply a reversion to mean, once the various influencers and blue-check pseuds got their bearings after the convention and found some talking points and news stories to coordinate around.