MILWAUKEE – The Tech Oversight Project Executive Director Sacha Haworth blasted Big Tech’s financial and political support for the GOP’s far-right, anti-democratic MAGA agenda after Elon Musk‘s X launched its first-ever partisan political hashtag icons on behalf of Donald Trump hours before Trump’s RNC speech as Musk announced plans to pour billions into the 2024 U.S. election on the disgraced former president’s behalf:
“Everyone who cares about preserving American democracy should be deeply alarmed to see tech oligarchs line up to embrace Donald Trump and pour billions into the extreme-right MAGA agenda – with Elon Musk at the front of the parade, exploiting the wreckage of Twitter to boost a would-be dictator. As defenders of democracy, we can’t ignore this emerging alliance of anti-democratic actors, far-right extremists, and Big Tech giants who promise to inflame the right wing agenda and war on our democracy with a firehose of Silicon Valley money.
“The 2024 RNC convention is Big Tech’s mask-off moment in its embrace of Donald Trump and the antidemocratic far right. Elon Musk and his Big Tech network’s support for the Trumpist extremism on display at the RNC tonight is a five-alarm fire for everybody who cares about our democracy. Advocates need to speak out loudly and urgently about the need to regulate Big Tech and rein in Silicon Valley’s outsized political power.”
Secret Musk/Trump ties revealed
- “In recent months, Musk and Trump had been burying their disagreements amid private calls and sharing ideas for immigration, technology and science.” (WSJ, 7/15/24)
- “Big names in tech are turning Donald Trump’s way, a shift likely to be accelerated by excitement over Elon Musk’s nine-figure commitment and former venture capitalist JD Vance joining the ticket.” (WSJ, 7/16/24)
- “Musk has told people he will donate around $45 million a month to a pro-Trump super political-action committee called America PAC.” (WSJ, 7/16/24)
- “Musk’s large donations to America PAC will position it to aggressively exploit a new loophole in federal campaign finance law … (that) will allow the Trump campaign to effectively control messaging backed by hundreds of millions of donations from Musk and a few other very wealthy people.” (Mother Jones, 7/18/24)
Big Tech’s heelturn on democracy
- Tech oligarchs led by Musk are lining up to embrace Trump …
- “It’s not just Peter Thiel, tech’s biggest contrarian, openly supporting Trump. It’s his fellow PayPal Mafia members like Musk and Sacks. It’s venture capitalists like Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, and many more.” (Semafor, 7/17/24)
- The 2024 GOP platform “signals a laissez-faire if not outright cozy approach to emerging sectors that have drawn scrutiny from the Biden administration.” (Washington Post, 7/10/24)
- “For the tech executives, the notion that every acquisition they hope to do over the next few years is going to get attacked so that even if they win it’ll get tied up for years—it finally draws them in.” (WSJ, 7/16/24)
- … driven by greed and extreme anti-democratic ideology that threatens the public good.
- The 2024 Republican platform and Project 2025 endorse extreme policies that would destroy our democracy as well as policies that would undermine Big Tech accountability by raising prices for goods and services online, eliminating the Federal Trade Commission and key worker protections, entrenching Big Tech’s political power, and paving the way for tech to roll back its climate pledges.
- This is part and parcel of a widely-recognized ideological shift in Silicon Valley that has been described as technoauthoritarianism. (The Atlantic, 1/30/24)
- Big Tech oligarchs like Elon Musk are not only supporting Donald Trump by bankingrolling him, they are also making it easier for Trump and his loyalists to spread lies and false narratives on social media.
- “The enormous temptation to share false claims is being actively rewarded by platforms such as X, formerly Twitter, where owner Elon Musk has made multiple interlocking decisions around account verification, payments to creators, and whom to allow on the platform that have facilitated a noisier and less trustworthy information ecosystem.” (CNN, 7/15/24)
- “The Trump shooting and its aftermath may be an even bigger indictment of Meta’s decision this year to stop promoting news, politics and social issues in its curated content feeds.” (CNN, 7/15/24)
- The 2024 Republican platform and Project 2025 endorse extreme policies that would destroy our democracy as well as policies that would undermine Big Tech accountability by raising prices for goods and services online, eliminating the Federal Trade Commission and key worker protections, entrenching Big Tech’s political power, and paving the way for tech to roll back its climate pledges.