Anne Applebaum

And depending on which part of the algorithm you're in is most shaped by Musk himself, you know, by what he says and his enormous numbers of followers.

I don't want to minimize these incidents because they're horrible.

I mean, but it's but it's true.

You can take one incident and you can tell a story about a whole country that isn't necessarily true.

I mean, just as you said, if the perpetrator is not, in fact, an immigrant.

Right.

or not an illegal immigrant or not a migrant at all.

And yet he's being used to whip up hatred of migrants.

You know, that's an illustration of how you can take a fact and twist it and distort it and make it into make a story that isn't necessarily political.

I understand that story.

It was a it was a police screw up and there was a there was a deliberate misinformation.

Right, which is not the first time that kind of thing has ever happened.

I mean, there are all kinds of domestic violence stories where, you know, men accuse women of doing various things.

And anyway, it's not completely unique.

But, you know, once you go down to the story, it doesn't have anything to do with the police being anti-white, which is the language that Elon Musk and his pals on X are using.

Right.

I mean, it's a horrible story.

It's a terrible story.

It's a police mistake and disaster, and it's a tragedy, but it isn't a political story in the way that it's being made to be.

And so that you can pluck these stories out of real life, turn them into something else on the internet, and then use the anger that they generate to create riots and people burning down houses somewhere else is pretty scary.