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这是伊隆·马斯克的 X，各国政府不得不忍受它
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/07/elon-musk-x-uk-trump-violence-00173067
作者：JOHN SAKELLARIADIS、CHRISTINE MUI 和 BRITTANY GIBSON 08/07/2024
从伦敦到华盛顿的官员都表示，马斯克不对任何人负责。
伊隆·马斯克发表讲话。
愤怒的官员们正试图找到影响世界首富的手段。 | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
伊隆·马斯克改版后的推特上，政治分歧和煽动性帖子的最大传播者竟然是马斯克本人。
在过去的两周里，这位亿万富翁煽动者在该平台上发布了一系列帖子，为英国几十年来最严重的反移民骚乱火上浇油；分享了一段副总统卡马拉·哈里斯自认为是“最多元化的总统人选”的篡改视频；并在没有证据的情况下声称拜登-哈里斯政府正在“大量引进”非法移民来左右 11 月的选举。
马斯克最近在网上发表了一系列含沙射影、半真半假和谎言，这越来越清楚地表明，这位科技大亨——而不仅仅是他的平台——对那些努力控制可能煽动极端暴力的内容的政府构成了最大的挑战。
民主党战略家亚当·帕克霍门科 (Adam Parkhomenko) 在谈到马斯克在 X 上的帖子和对其他人内容不干预的态度时表示：“埃隆正在以一种前所未有的方式将其武器化。”“只是有点怀疑他为什么被允许这样做。”
X 没有回应对本文的置评请求。
愤怒的官员们正试图找到影响世界首富的手段。
一些英国议员周二表示，他们计划就马斯克在英国骚乱期间发表的言论，将他带到议会接受质询。密歇根州国务卿和北卡罗来纳州选举委员会本周表示，在收到投诉后，他们将对马斯克创建的超级政治行动委员会可能滥用个人数据的情况展开调查。
周一，五名州选举官员致信马斯克，敦促他修复 X ??上的一个人工智能工具，该工具上个月错误地暗示哈里斯没有资格参加 2024 年的总统选举。
明尼苏达州州务卿史蒂夫·西蒙表示，他招募了其他官员，包括宾夕法尼亚州的共和党同行，签署了这封信，因为该公司对之前的投诉反应冷漠。
“现在大声说出来很重要，因为在未来的 92 天内，类似的错误可能会带来更大的风险，”民主党人西蒙说。“今天，这是关于投票权的问题，但如果不加以制止和监管，下个月，如果是选民登记规则的问题怎么办？”
但措辞强硬的信仍然只是……措辞强硬的信。
“我们的国务卿恳求一位自恋的亿万富翁管好自己，这一事实在我看来表明，我们作为一个社会正处于高度危险之中，没有得到保护，因为缺乏责任感和艰难的决策，而这些本应由政府最高层做出，”当时 Twitter 的前研究员、现加州大学洛杉矶分校研究平台的教授莎拉·T·罗伯茨 (Sarah T. Roberts) 说。
英国的情况已经更加危急。英国当局动员了大约 6,000 名警员，因为极右翼团体计划在全国 30 个地点实施袭击，此前一名嫌疑人被误认为是穆斯林移民，实施了致命的刺伤袭击。
自称“言论自由绝对主义者”的马斯克加倍下注。他最初宣称英国“内战不可避免”，首相凯尔·斯塔默的办公室表示，他的言论“毫无道理”。马斯克的回应是抹黑斯塔默是“两面派”——这显然是指英国警方在肇事者不是白人时对暴力行为的严厉程度较低的说法。英国司法部长海蒂·亚历山大敦促“每个拥有平台的人”都要“负责任地行使自己的权力”。
马斯克还展开了更广泛的斗争。周二，X 向在马斯克收购该网站后暂停广告支出的广告商提起了联邦反垄断诉讼。 “我们尝试和平已有两年，现在却变成了战争，”马斯克说。X 首席执行官琳达·亚卡里诺 (Linda Yaccarino) 在一封公开信中写道：“简单地说，当思想市场受到破坏，一些观点没有得到资助，而其他观点则因为非法抵制而得不到资助，人们就会受到伤害。”
这场闹剧似乎只会让马斯克在美国右翼中冉冉升起的新星更加光彩夺目。
周二，前总统唐纳德·特朗普 (Donald Trump) 宣布，他将于下周“与埃隆·马斯克 (Elon Musk) 进行一次重要访谈”。
当马斯克在 2022 年收购 Twitter 时，他承诺将彻底改革其内容审核方式，并让平台上的言论“尽可能自由”。
作为“首席推特”的第一步就是恢复特朗普的账户。在特朗普的推特账户被永久停用后，Twitter 已永久停用该账户，以降低“进一步煽动暴力的风险”。
特朗普在推特上支持他的粉丝，他们曾对美国国会大厦发动致命袭击。
到 2023 年，马斯克将该平台更名为 X，裁掉了一半的选举诚信团队，解散了信任和安全委员会，并取消了 Twitter 的旧用户验证系统，允许任何人支付“蓝色勾选”费用，这些勾选是高调用户在提交身份证明后获得的。
这些举动引发了反对。由于担心广告活动会与仇恨言论一起出现，各公司减少了广告支出；马斯克告诉他们“去你妈的”。
欧盟委员会 7 月发现 X 的蓝色勾选政策“具有欺骗性”，违反了《欧盟数字服务法》，可能导致巨额罚款。马斯克对此作出回应，指责该机构向他的平台提供“非法秘密交易”，以迫使他审查言论。
但共和党强硬派对马斯克的改变表示欢迎。他们说，早些时候，推特利用其内容审核政策来压制他们，不公平地将合法的保守派观点打上“虚假信息”的标签。
“没有人比埃隆·马斯克在互联网言论自由方面做得更多，他的平台比以往任何时候都更好，”众议员吉姆·乔丹 (R-Ohio) 的发言人拉塞尔·戴伊 (Russell Dye) 说。
作为众议院司法委员会主席，乔丹带头调查“大型科技审查制度”，部分依靠马斯克公开的内部文件，这些文件是推特决定删除链接到亨特·拜登笔记本电脑的故事的帖子。
当右翼拥抱马斯克时，他也拥抱了右翼。
对于这位前民主党捐助者来说，这是一个意识形态的转变，他说他在 2020 年投票支持乔·拜登总统。
两年后的 11 月，马斯克支持好斗的共和党州长罗恩·德桑蒂斯 (Ron DeSantis) 担任总统，后者承诺他的州是“觉醒者去死的地方”。 7 月，马斯克公开支持特朗普，周三，他写道：“卡玛拉确实是共产主义者，尽管没有证据。”
众议院监督委员会资深成员杰米·拉斯金 (D-Md.) 众议员在接受采访时表示，X 已被收买。“吉姆·乔丹和 MAGA 共和党人多年来一直在抱怨推特和脸书上对他们的偏见，”他说。“他们现在基本上得到了他们想要的一切，而 X 是埃隆·马斯克本人的右翼宣传和虚假信息载体。”
随着特朗普的竞选团队继续将 Instagram 和 YouTube 等其他平台打上威胁的标签，马斯克和共和党旗手之间的新协同效应已经显现。
“像 Meta 和谷歌这样的大型科技公司被曝光传播有关特朗普总统的错误信息和虚假信息，公然试图干涉选举，”特朗普竞选团队发言人 Steven Cheung 说。特朗普的竞选团队并没有直接解决有关 X 或马斯克的错误信息。
Meta 拒绝置评，但表示其平台在特朗普 7 月躲过暗杀后，错误地将事实核查标签贴在了他的照片上，随后才修复了错误。谷歌没有立即回应置评请求。
在美国大选前的最后几个月，马斯克全身心投入到选举管理的琐碎问题中。
6 月，马斯克呼吁淘汰电子投票机，尽管目前使用的绝大多数投票机（包括每个摇摆州的投票机）都打印纸质选票，选民可以在现场核实。
他还多次分享或转发未经证实的说法，称数十万非法移民正在登记参加这次选举的投票，民主党正在帮助他们。他后来暗示，任何反对共和党支持的新法律的人都应该被判处死刑，该法律旨在阻止非公民投票。
无党派选举创新与研究中心执行董事兼创始人戴维·贝克尔表示，鉴于马斯克在 X 上有近 2 亿粉丝，他特别担心马斯克放大选举虚假信息的能力。
他认为，马斯克的帖子一天可以积累“数千万”的浏览量，而选举官员在同一时期可能只能获得 1,000 到 2,000 次浏览量。
“他作为超级传播者传播虚假信息的能力无人能及，”贝克尔说。
其他国家曾试图追究马斯克的责任，但都以失败告终。马斯克的 X 拒绝隐藏澳大利亚刺伤袭击的帖子，导致该平台在联邦法院胜诉。巴西最高法院法官下令对马斯克涉嫌传播虚假新闻展开调查。
拉斯金表示，他希望美国最高法院最近做出的一项裁决支持政府有权向科技平台举报虚假信息，这将有助于“重申”政府官员打击选举虚假信息的承诺。
但拜登政府在案件审理期间大幅缩减了许多此类努力，拉斯金表示，他不确定联邦机构在多大程度上“恢复了那些
之前就存在的制约因素。”
对于哈里斯和特朗普的竞选团队来说，社交媒体的作用和猖獗的虚假信息并不是 2024 年周期所独有的。尽管如此，马斯克在 X 上制定规则的能力以及他在 X 上的霸权地位，在今年 11 月提出了一个独特的挑战。
策略师 Parkhomenko 表示，自从马斯克收购该公司私有化以来，限制马斯克影响力的工具就越来越少：“如果这是其他东西，比如一家上市公司，那么摆在桌面上的选择就没有那么多了，”他说。
一位不愿透露姓名的哈里斯竞选官员分享了内部运作情况，他表示，该团队已经成立了一个团队来处理社交媒体上的虚假信息。
X 仍然是选举格局中的主导特征。拥有 3800 万粉丝的拜登利用该平台宣布退出竞选。
即使在特朗普被赶下台并成立 Truth Social 之后，他在自己平台上的帖子在 X 上转发时也会获得动力——包括他宣布即将采访马斯克。
每天早上和工作日下午提供华盛顿官方的非官方指南。
It's Elon Musk's X and governments are having to live with it
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/07/elon-musk-x-uk-trump-violence-00173067
By JOHN SAKELLARIADIS, CHRISTINE MUI and BRITTANY GIBSON
Officials from London to Washington say Musk is accountable to no one.
The biggest spreader of political divisiveness and incendiary posts on Elon Musk’s revamped Twitter is turning out to be Musk himself.
In just the last two weeks on the platform — since rebranded X — the billionaire provocateur unloaded a string of posts that poured fuel on the fire of Britain’s worst anti-immigration riots in decades; shared a doctored video of Vice President Kamala Harris deeming herself the “ultimate diversity hire” for president; and claimed without evidence that the Biden-Harris administration is “importing vast numbers” of illegal aliens to swing the November election.
Musk’s latest flurry of innuendo, half-truths and lies online is making it increasingly clear that it is the tech mogul — and not just his platform — who poses the greatest challenge to governments struggling to rein in content that can incite extremist violence.
“Elon is weaponizing this in a way it hasn’t been weaponized before,” Democratic strategist Adam Parkhomenko said of Musk’s posts and hands-off approach to others’ content on X. “It just is sort of questionable why he’s allowed to do what he’s doing.”
X did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Angry officials are trying to find levers to pull to influence the world’s richest man.
Some British MPs said Tuesday they plan to haul Musk in for questioning in front of parliament over his posts amid the U.K. riots. Michigan’s secretary of state and North Carolina’s Board of Elections said this week they are launching investigations into potential misuses of personal data by a Super PAC created by Musk after they received complaints.
And on Monday, five state election officials sent a letter to Musk urging him to fix an AI tool on X that falsely suggested last month that Harris was ineligible to appear on the 2024 presidential ballot.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said he recruited other officials, including his Republican counterpart in Pennsylvania, to sign on to the letter because the company had reacted with indifference to earlier complaints.
“It’s important to speak up loudly now because a similar mistake in the future, over the next 92 days, might be a higher-stakes situation,” said Simon, a Democrat. “Today, it’s about ballot access, but if left unchecked and unpoliced, what if next month, it’s about voter registration rules?”
But a strongly worded letter is still just … a strongly worded letter.
“The fact that we have secretaries of state begging a narcissistic billionaire to behave himself suggests to me that we as a society are highly endangered and unprotected by a lack of responsibility and hard decision making that should be made at the highest levels of government,” said Sarah T. Roberts, a former staff researcher at then-Twitter, now a professor at UCLA studying platforms.
And higher-stakes situations are already unfolding in the U.K. British authorities are mobilizing some 6,000 officers as far-right groups plan to target as many as 30 spots around the country following a fatal stabbing attack by a suspect falsely identified as a Muslim immigrant.
Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” has doubled down. He initially declared that “civil war is inevitable” in the U.K., comments that Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office said had “no justification.” Musk responded by smearing Starmer as “twotierkeir” — an apparent reference to claims that British police treat violence less harshly when the perpetrators are not white. U.K. Justice Minister Heidi Alexander has urged “everyone who has a platform” to exercise “their power responsibly.”
Musk also went on a broader battle footing. On Tuesday, X brought a federal antitrust lawsuit against advertisers who had paused their spending after Musk’s acquisition of the site. “We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war,” Musk said. “To put it simply, people are hurt when the marketplace of ideas is undermined and some viewpoints are not funded over others as part of an illegal boycott,” X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote in an open letter.
The drama seems to have only burnished Musk’s rising star with the American right.
On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump announced that he will be doing “A MAJOR INTERVIEW WITH ELON MUSK” next week.
When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he promised he would overhaul its approach to moderating content and make speech on the platform “as free as possible.”
One of his first moves as “Chief Twit” was to reinstate Trump’s account. Twitter had permanently suspended it to reduce “risk of further incitement of violence” after Trump tweeted support for his followers who had launched a deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol.
By 2023, Musk had rebranded the platform as X, axed half of its election integrity team, dissolved its trust and safety council, and done away with Twitter’s old user verification system by allowing anyone to pay for “blue checks” that high-profile users had previously earned after submitting proof of their identities.
The moves provoked pushback. Companies drew down their ad spending due to concerns that campaigns would appear alongside hate speech; Musk told them to “go fuck yourself.”
The European Commission in July found X’s blue checkmark policy “deceptive” and in violation of the EU Digital Services Act, which could lead to hefty fines. Musk responded by accusing the body of offering his platform an “illegal secret deal” to pressure him to censor speech.
But Republican hardliners have heralded Musk’s changes. They say the earlier Twitter weaponized its content moderation policies to silence them, unfairly branding legitimate conservative opinions as “disinformation.”
“No one is doing more for free speech on the internet than Elon Musk and his platform is working better than ever,” said Russell Dye, a spokesperson for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
As chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Jordan spearheaded investigations into “Big Tech censorship,” relying in part on internal documents Musk made public over Twitter’s decisions to remove posts linking to a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
And as the right embraced Musk, he embraced the right.
It was an ideological shift for the former Democratic donor who said he voted for President Joe Biden in 2020.
By November two years later, Musk endorsed for president Florida’s combative Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who promised his state was “where woke goes to die.” In July, Musk publicly endorsed Trump, and on Wednesday he wrote, without evidence, “Kamala is quite literally a communist.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, said in an interview that X had been co-opted. “Jim Jordan and the MAGA Republicans were whining for years about bias against them on Twitter and Facebook,” he said. “They’ve now essentially gotten everything they want, and X is a right-wing propaganda and disinformation vehicle for Elon Musk himself.”
The new synergy between Musk and the Republican standard bearer has emerged as Trump’s campaign continues to brand other platforms like Instagram and YouTube as a threat.
“Big Tech companies like Meta and Google have been exposed for spreading misinformation and disinformation about President Trump in a blatant attempt to interfere in the election,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said. Trump’s campaign did not directly address misinformation on X or about Musk.
Meta declined to comment, but has said its platforms incorrectly applied a fact check label to a photo of Trump after he survived a July assassination attempt, before fixing the error. Google did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
In the final months before the U.S. elections, Musk has hurled himself into weedy issues of election administration.
In June, Musk called for the elimination of electronic voting machines, even though the vast majority of voting machines in use today — including in every swing state — print a paper ballot voters can verify on site.
He has also repeatedly shared or retweeted unsubstantiated claims that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants are registering to vote in this election, and that Democrats are helping them. He later implied that anyone opposing a new GOP-backed law aimed at preventing non-citizens from voting deserved the death penalty.
David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said he is particularly concerned about Musk’s ability to amplify falsehoods about elections given his nearly 200 million followers on X.
Musk’s posts can rack up “tens of millions” of views in a day, whereas election officials might only get 1,000 to 2,000 views in that same period, he argued.
“His ability to spread disinformation as a superspreader is unmatched,” Becker said.
Other countries have tried and failed to hold Musk accountable. Musk’s X refused to hide posts of a stabbing attack in Australia, resulting in a federal court case that the platform won. A Supreme Court justice in Brazil ordered an investigation into Musk over his alleged dissemination of fake news.
Raskin said he is hopeful that a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision backing the government’s right to flag disinformation to tech platforms would help “renew the commitment” of government officials to combat false information on elections.
But the Biden administration dramatically scaled many of those efforts back while the case worked its way through the courts, and Raskin said he wasn’t sure to what extent federal agencies “have restored the kinds of checks that existed before.”
For the Harris and Trump campaigns, the roles of social media and the rampant misinformation are not unique to the 2024 cycle. Nevertheless, Musk’s ability to set the rules on X and his bully pulpit on it presents a unique challenge this November.
Parkhomenko, the strategist, said there are fewer tools to restrict Musk’s reach since his takeover took the company private: “There’s not as many options on the table as there might be, if this was something else, like a publicly traded company,” he said.
A Harris campaign official, granted anonymity to share internal operations, said that it has a team in place to handle social media disinformation.
X remains a dominant feature of the election landscape. Biden, with 38 million followers, used the platform to announce he would withdraw from the race.
Even after Trump was ousted and founded Truth Social, his posts on his own platform gather momentum when they are reposted on X — including his announcement of his upcoming interview with Musk.
