Racist pseudo-science is making a comeback thanks to Elon Musk. Recently, the tech billionaire has been retweeting prominent race scientist adherents on his platform X (formally known as Twitter), spreading misinformation about racial minorities’ intelligence and physiology to his audience of 176.3 million followers—a dynamic my colleague Garrison Hayes analyzes in his latest video for Mother Jones.
X, and before it Twitter, has a long-held reputation for being a breeding ground for white supremacy. Dating as far back as the 2016 election, these extremists have used the app to sow seeds of misinformation and spread racism. Garrison zeroes in on a specific phenomenon: Musk is amplifying users who will incorporate cherry-picked data and misleading graphs into their argument as to why people of European descent are biologically superior.
He shows how fringe accounts, like user @eyeslasho, experience a drastic jump in followers after Musk shares their tweets. The @eyeslasho account even thanked Musk for raising “awareness” in a thread last year. (Neither @eyeslasho nor Musk, via X, responded to Garrison’s request for an interview.)
“People are almost more susceptible to simpler charts with race and IQ than they are to the really complicated stuff,” Will Stancil, a lawyer and research fellow at the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, told Garrison in a video interview. He added: “This is the most basic statistical error in the book: Correlation does not equal causation.”
In 2022, just one week after Musk purchased Twitter, the Center for Countering Digital Hate —an online civil rights group— found that racial slurs against Black people had increased three times the year’s average, with homophobic and transphobic epithets also seeing a significant uptick, according to the Associated Press.
More than a year later, Musk made headlines once again for tweeting racist dog whistles in a potential attempt to “woo” a recently fired Tucker Carlson. But, his new shift into sharing tech-bro-friendly bigotry carries its own unique set of consequences. Garrison also talks to Dr. Sasha Gusev, a statistical geneticist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, who points out that because this racism is seemingly backed by scientific fact, people often lack the language to call out its problematic nature. “There’s a kind of fusion between old-school gutter racism that everyone can recognize and this new-school Silicon Valley, data-driven analysis. And I think that this is very confusing to people,” said Gusev. “They don’t know what to do with it. They say, ‘Hey, there’s this thing that I recognize as ugly, and then there’s somebody posting a hundred charts that seem to support it.'”