Self-described free speech advocates like Elon Musk have been conspicuously silent
Back in January, I wrote a piece here about the first anniversary of the January 6th attack focusing on the conspicuous silence of a wide range of tech leaders and VCs, people who pride themselves on how innovative they are, how they’re making the world a better place, yadda yadda. It’s now been nearly a week since a young white racist drove himself to a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo and then entered a supermarket, deliberately shooting at people and shouting racist slurs as he did. Thirteen people were shot, eleven Black and two white, and ten died.
The shooter live-streamed his attack and also posted a racist manifesto online that makes clear he believes in the “great replacement theory” (GRT) that America’s white majority is being deliberately replaced by Democrats, Jews, people of color and other elites all dedicated to white genocide by illegal immigration, and that he was radicalized in part by the manifestos of other previous mass shooters who believed in similar ideas. As many people have been pointing out, a lot of bad actors in the Republican ecosystem, led by Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson and ranging all the way up to former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the current number three in the GOP House, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), have been mainstreaming GRT with lightly veiled references to Democratic efforts to “overthrow the electorate and create a permanent liberal majority (Stefanik), leftist attacks seeking to “drown [out] classic Americans” (Gingrich) and so on.
Fascism spreads when good people stay silent, so everyone, including the big swinging dicks of the tech industry, has a responsibility to make clear they will not tolerate the spread of these ideas and take steps to stop them. A quick survey from the past week is not encouraging.
Elon Musk has a big Tesla factory in Buffalo, but he hasn’t said a word about the attack, nor about the efforts that Twitter has made to keep the shooter’s video from spreading. As this piece in The Verge notes, it’s not as if he’s too busy to make noise in public about things he cares about. Five hours after it happened, he tweeted about how users “could access the chronological feed to avoid being ‘manipulated by the algorithm.’ Later on in the evening, he found time to share a newsletter from Matt Taibbi on corporate regulation in California, some images of a recent Space X launch, and a royal portrait of King Louis XIV of France. The next day, he revisited the thread on chronological ordering with a tweet about the importance of open-source code. On Monday, he found enough time to troll Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal in a conversation about spam. But watchers looking for any comment on Buffalo found nothing.” I suppose Tesla’s record of racial discrimination doesn’t suggest that Musk, a white South African who grew up under apartheid, really cares much about Black people.
Mark Zuckerberg, who is no doubt enjoying a reprieve from being the world’s most disparaged tech billionaire, has said nothing about Buffalo or GRT on his Facebook page, where he is followed by 119 million people, but he did share a post about his 10th wedding anniversary and some new business products he’s launching. So brave.
Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, plugged their #Brandcast event on Twitter and shared a photo of herself with Lizzo, the popstar, this past week. But again, silence about Buffalo. People forget that a shooter went on a rampage at YouTube HQ in 2018 after complaining about censorship of her videos, but even that close encounter hasn’t spurred a dramatic change in YouTube content moderation. As a new report from the Tech Transparency Project shows, local militia videos promoting the January 6th attack are “still flourishing on YouTube.” (Its chief product officer, Neil Mohan, continues to deny that YouTube’s algorithm promotes far-right content and insists it’s doing everything it can to block hate speech on its platform.)
Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter, has also had nothing to say about Buffalo. But he did find time to plug Oliver Stone’s controversial documentary The Putin Diaries, which offer a whitewash of the Russian leader’s intentions in Ukraine. I’m all for considering contrarian viewpoints, but Dorsey, who is like most tech successes a political naif, is way in over his head promoting Stone.
Tim Cook of Apple, who did speak up initially after January 6th happened, has reverted back to his default position of avoiding controversy and has said nothing about Buffalo.
From Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, nada. Nor from Microsoft President Brad Smith, who is usually the more outspoken and conscientious leader in the giant company’s executive suite.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon, which owns Twitch, where the shooter livestreamed his racist massacre, has said nothing about Buffalo or his company’s responsibility to do more about extremist content. But he did find time to criticize the Biden administration’s efforts to tame inflation and to brag about the 25th anniversary of Amazon going public on the stock exchange.
Even Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, and a big donor to Democratic causes, hasn’t surfaced to say anything about tech’s role in recent events. Maybe he’s just tired of being the only tech billionaire with a conscience.
The biggest mouths in tech VC world also didn’t distinguish themselves.
Chris Dixon of Andreesen Horowitz, a prolific tweeter with more than 800,000 followers, posted endlessly cheerleading for crypto and Web3 this past week (despite or perhaps because of the crypto crash) but found no time to say anything about tech’s role in Buffalo or in abetting political extremism.
Balaji Srinivasan, considered by many VCs to be one of their most profound thinkers, posted a plug for his forthcoming book, The Network State, which is about “how to start a new country,” but that was it from him. Nothing about saving the country that makes his own wealth possible. (The book genuinely sounds interesting, however.)
Marc Andreessen, another tech big head, had nothing to say about Buffalo.
And finally, Jason Calacanis, noted angel investor and maestro of the popular “All In” tech podcast, was busy hosting the All In Summit in Miami this past week, where he reportedly tangled with Palmer Luckey, the Oculus founder known for his strong support for Trump. I haven’t seen any details on what was said (if you have any, please share!), and the encounter ended with a hug between the two men that the audience cheered. Calacanis hasn’t said anything about Buffalo or the mainstreaming of the “great replacement” theory, but he did have time to tweet yesterday about how Democrats are supposedly excluding moderates (like him?) from the party.
And that’s just a quick look. The silence is deafening.