Musk's most hypocritical contradiction

X has become a platform for promoting its owner and his far-right ideology. This means that, if you're not careful, all of his tweets are thrown right in your face, with a worrying density considering the number of companies he (allegedly) manages. Amid this Twitter verbiage, one message catches my eye: it's the list of most downloaded apps in the Apple App Store, in the news category. X appears in first place, and this has prompted the billionaire to declare that "X is the number 1 news source on Earth."

The outcry is equivocal and deceitful. Because X, in reality, isn't a news app. It doesn't produce content. It's just a vast, unregulated showcase where everyone, serious media outlets and information scammers alike, can offer their take. The platform merely allows this to happen and doesn't act as a publisher (I was going to write that I wish it did, but evidently under Musk's auspices this would be, directly, even more calamitous). The entrepreneur takes advantage of a dubious categorization to polarize and disparage the media, which are the ones that made Twitter grow by offering their articles. It would be like saying that the (heroic) newsstands (that remain) are the main news providers. Technically, this could be considered true, but it's obvious that the equation wouldn't be understood without the press they contain, published by journalists and editors. Musk's tweet is misleading propaganda and part of his war on fact-based media. He knows that, without his role in coordinating communities—and despite the errors and shortcomings they endure—the terrain is much more scorched for him to be able to direct the masses toward something that is a falsely innocent algorithm.