Thread by @senategabe

As promised @RoKhanna, this is my second thread calling you out. This time for your relationship with Elon Musk despite Elon systematically turning Twitter into a safe haven for nazis.

I thought a good place to start is a tweet from 2 days ago. Weird right? What does it mean?

https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/1775271563128123557

By my count, Elon's tweeted that 17 times and as far as I can see, received zero press coverage. To the untrained eye, it is just another strange, bizarre thing that Elon has said.

But I am Jewish. My grandfather is a holocaust survivor. I know what this is.

Neo-Nazis, up till say...2 years ago, used code to say hateful things. Few would ever allow someone into polite society with a swastika on their arm after all. So nazis often take innocent things, most famously Pepe the Frog, and make them into coded hatred.

Going back to the tweet at the top, this is straight from that playbook. A character was created: a clown called Honk Honk, Pepe the Frog with a clown wig, expressed for short with a clown world emoji.

Honk Honk...Heil Hitler.

Yes I'm sure. Here is a snippet from the International Journal of Security Studies:

The problem is, it's not just this. I'll keep the thread moving so won't list them but aside from this insanity, there are dozens of disturbing examples if you comb carefully through Elon's feed.

Elon got snagged in major controversy because of the one time he broke the code. He responded to a post that explicitly defended Hitler. That was months after the first time he posted clown world and his hatred goes back years.

It's why I first left when he purchased Twitter.

But ok, so he posts Neo-Nazi memes, big deal.

Well first off, that is a HUGE deal. Most reading this had no idea what that meant, the owner of this site is literally wading through bile and posting coded language to wink at nazis.

But let's pretend he's not.

@RoKhanna, you say you believe in free speech. You also defended it, even when politically inconvenient, as leaked in an email you thought was private before Elon let "journalists" access Twitter's internal data.

I blacked out your address out of respect but it was leaked.

Back in college, I was very concerned with free speech myself. I went to a super liberal college and wanted to challenge some assumptions.

So I wrote a column for the paper called "Trigger Warning". I will explain a bit more about that in a QT but I stand by the content.

This was not published because the editor insisted I put a forward in my columns saying I was engaging in hate speech which I...refused lol.

The college president got involved and it was a whole thing.

I bring this up just because having personally been censored for "hate speech", I understand why the issue can be tricky.

What Elon is doing is not tricky and its disturbing that you think otherwise @RoKhanna, as evidenced by these quotes (2nd one to be fair from Dec, 2022).

These almost makes sense if you think that Elon is a passive observer of an immensely important social platform for Congress. Or if it was ever anything but obvious why he wanted to buy Twitter.

If the member of congress for Silicon Valley thinks this: my god.

As folks probably remember, soon after he took over the platform, Elon reinstated virtually single account that had previously been banned.

This predictably generated backlash and he rebanned many of them...then unbanned many again after the controversy died down.

A good example of this is the account TopLobsta. Elon interacts with his tweets. Most famously when he tweeted what is below. We can know thanks to one of the few analytic trackers we have, SocialBlade, TopLobsta recieved a significant spike in follower growth in the aftermath.

Elon deleted his post without explanation after the backlash but he left TopLobsta around to keep spreading hatred, which he does, often by attacking accounts of Jews.

Take a look at an example from yesterday here. And what some of the commenters said in her replies afterwards.

Two free speech questions here:
Number 1) Who is getting the right to free speech if Nazis freely dominate disussions of people tweeting "I'm Jewish"?

Number 2) If Elon cares about free speech so much, why does he sue anyone who points stuff like this out for defamation?

I'm not the first to have pointed out how Twitter empowers white supremacy. The Center for Countering Digital Hate published a report on this.

I'm not sure I can link it directly without being banned so I'll post snippets. Musk responded by suing them for defamation.

Media Matters also ran a report about Elon Musk. Which then got them sued by Elon Musk for defamation. Now Republican AGs are getting involved because Elon has made Twitter a center for the right wing media ecosystem.

But sure, let's pretend this idiot cares about free speech.

Shame on you @RoKhanna for ignoring this. This isn't about dumb tweets by a "seventh grader".

And assuming tweets are nothing are what Republicans used to do with Trump...even though Rep. Khanna's colleagues showed they directly led to an insurrection.
npr.org/2022/07/13/111…

I'm curious how Rep. Khanna thinks this ends. Today I decided to only talk about Jewish hatred just because its personal and "novel" in the sense people thought he was keeping a lid on it.

But if you are Black, trans, or an immigrant, he attacks freely and no one cares.

To be perfectly honest @RoKhanna, I felt sick listening to that Twitter space with Elon you told me to check out. Elon talked about a bunch of nonsensical AI topics and you praised him repeatedly.

You are legitimizing a disturbed person who embraces hatred.

You mention how you think he is a genius innovator and entrepreneur. Let's pretend I agree.

Has it ever occurred to you that his latest innovation is turning the platform that you are using to communicate with me now, and how you get your news, into a hatred machine for nazis?

I debated whether to tag a few of these openly Nazi accounts just so everyone can see what happens. I won't but they will find these posts anyway and if they do, I know what will happen. Bring it on.

But don't be stupid. Stop legitimizing evil. And that's what the hell this is.

I'm going to wrap this up just because this is already too long but some other areas for further exploration I would highly reccomend looking at are how Elon directly pays Tucker Carlson who tweets insane stuff like this and promotes violence when things flare up at Eagle Pass.

Also thinking about how pre-Elon Twitter confirmed to me on a conference call with Senate digital directors that they manipulated reach of political accounts they thought engaged in "disinformation" and consider that Elon is certainly doing the same thing but...

his weaponization of the Twitter API and the way he limits how even basic functions of the site display now means that it is become next to impossible to systematically confirm any of this.

As the blue check marks descend and the twitter file nutcases, I would like to point out that for most of the time I was in the Senate, Twitter didn't even have a Dem outreach person.

They briefed the Senate Dems infamously with an ex RNC staffer! So liberal censorship my ass.

There is something deeply wrong with Elon Musk, and if @RoKhanna you want to defend him because geniuses can be difficult or whatever after everything I just said, I honestly am speechless.

Which is also what anyone other than christian white males will be if this keeps up. /End

@RoKhanna @threadreaderapp unroll