Friday, January 03, 2025

Modulating minds, controlling global narrative: Is Elon Musk spreading prejudices, pushing a right-wing agenda to control masses' minds?



By Shams Ur Rehman Alavi

Billionaire and social media owner Elon Musk has come in for sharp criticism on internet. 

The man who didn't show much emotion when schools and hospitals were targeted in Gaza and tens of thousands were killed, but is now frantically pushing a divisive agenda.

As he owns an influential social media platform, X, [formerly Twitter], he is supposed to behave responsibly. But, he has lately been sharing controversial views, bordering on hate and having the potential to demonize entire communities. 

The racist and xenophobic overtones are clearly discernible. As he owns the platform, that can control a user's reach, his own tweets seem to have been exempt from any restriction and reach millions, giving him a disproportionate edge, over the rest. 

Not the Epstein island culprits, but brings other and old issues in other countries to raise fingers, intervene in other nations and subtly demonize entire groups, races and communities. 

Intervening in Germany, UK, hate against Africans, blacks, browns, Islamophobia, all is simple. Certain power block also helping him. Aim is to put pressure on the regimes and go for more and more control over the world?

One day, focus on an African in Europe, on the other day about England, not about the supremacist and school shooters or the skeletons in the cupboards of powerful people in own country. If the posts, tweets are seen carefully, it's mostly about race, religion and Asia-Africa, immigrants and 'otherizing' people. 

It becomes easy to control minds. It's possible to shift the people's focus off anything if you own media. If 10K whites are booked for offences in year, media has power to relegate to inside pages, but it can pick 10 offences by Black or Hispanic, immigrant or Muslim, splash on Page 1.

This will demonize, damage and devastate those communities, through negative portrayal. Misuse of a big social media platform, to term certain groups or communities as outsider or more prone to committing crimes, without giving data or mentioning statistics, is nothing less than brainwashing of the society. 

This is horrible. Many prominent personalities have noted how Musk has been going about, his posts going to the next level. If you have a billion or more audience on your platform and you post messages, endlessly, on a spree to push an agenda, it can create tremendous impact. 

"Am I detecting a continuous wave of Islamophobic comments and tweets from Elon the past few weeks or is it just me?", wrote Lady Velvet alias Hend F Q who uses the handle @LadyVelvet_HFQ. Just like her worry, many others have posted about the change in Musk's behaviour on X.

Will he realise. Can the world deal with it! Won't this lead to huge shift in public opinion and might pose grave thread to social ties, relations. Such careless demonizing can cause disturbance in societies on ethnic, racial and religious lines. It's not something that should be ignored. [The image is representative, AI generated]

WATCH THE SHORT VIDEO ON MUSK AND HIS ACTIONS