This has been a banner month for X. Last week, the social network’s built-in chatbot, Grok, became strangely obsessed with false claims about “white genocide” in South Africa—allegedly because someone made an “unauthorized modification” to its code at 3:15 in the morning. The week prior, Ye (formerly Kanye West) released a single on the platform called “Heil Hitler.” The chorus includes the line “Heil Hitler, they don’t understand the things I say on Twitter.” West has frequently posted anti-Semitic rants on the platform and, at one point back in February, said he identified as a Nazi. (Yesterday on X, West said he was “done with antisemitism,” though he has made such apologies before; in any case, the single has already been viewed tens of millions of times on X.)
These incidents feel all too natural for Elon Musk’s social network. Even without knowing the precise technical reason Grok decided to do its best Alex Jones impression, the fact that it became monomaniacally obsessed with a white-supremacist talking point says something about what the platform has become since Musk took over in October 2022. Specifically, it validates that X has become a political weapon in his far-right activism. (To be clear, white farmers have been murdered in South Africa, which has one of the world’s highest murder rates, according to Reuters. But there is no indication of a genocide. In 2024, eight of the 26,232 murders nationwide were committed against farmers. Most murder victims there are Black.)
This has been obvious to anyone using the site or paying attention to Musk’s managerial decisions. He’s reinstated thousands of banned accounts (QAnon supporters and conspiracy theorists, and at least one bona fide neo-Nazi) and the platform is engorged with low-rent outrage porn, bigoted memes, MAGA AI slop, and, well, a lot of people proudly using racial slurs, frequently to attack other people on X. The platform’s defenders would likely argue that X is a true experiment in free-speech maximalism and that it is one of the only truly neutral zones on social media. Musk and his sycophants have constantly cited his takeover as an attempt to “solve free speech”; Joe Rogan has suggested that Musk has done just that. (This isn’t quite true, as X has complied with government takedown requests, temporarily suspended journalist accounts, amplified accounts that promote Musk’s worldview, and tried to censor words its owner doesn’t like: Last year, it briefly warned users who attempted to use the word cisgender in posts, after Musk said he considers it a “slur.”)
But Grok’s white-genocide Wednesday is a major indication that the platform is not neutral. X either has a natural bias, based on the site’s architecture and user base—that is, the chatbot, which is able to search tweets in real time, acts on an attitude that is endemic to the platform—or X is being directly manipulated to emphasize a certain viewpoint. In other words: Either way, X is racist. The only thing up for debate is whether this is a feature or a bug for those in charge.
Twitter always had an outsize cultural influence, and X—despite its marked decline under Musk—does as well. Yet mainstream culture is no longer dominant there: The media outlets and public figures are now punch lines for the site’s main characters, Musk and his MAGA acolytes. Platform events such as the Grok rampage and Ye’s “Heil Hitler” offer a window into the ways that X has become an accelerator for a broader, more durable culture of hate. It’s not only that some of this vile discourse seeps out into the physical world (memes about immigrants eating cats and dogs leading to harassment in Ohio;, Trump bringing up conspiracy theories about white genocide during an Oval Office meeting with the South African president)—it’s that the worst of the internet is no longer relegated to the shadows. Instead, it is elevated, perhaps even at times normalized, by its proximity to everyone else’s content.
Last Wednesday, as I watched Grok bring up white genocide in response to an anodyne query about the Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer’s career earnings, I couldn’t shake the question: Why are people still using this website? The same thought had also occurred to me around the time that Ye released “Heil Hitler” and I toggled over to X’s algorithmic “For You” feed. It showed a smattering of the platform’s least savory commentators posting about how the anti-Semitic anthem was “the song of the year” and how it had become popular in Thailand. What happened next is pretty standard: By clicking on a few posts about the song, I’d expressed enough interest in it that the platform fed me a steady stream of “Heil Hitler” content: AI-generated remixes of the song, covers, dozens of memes about how the song was secretly popular. I saw a video of a white couple singing the song in their car, throwing up Nazi salutes. Not long after that, I saw a link to a crowdfunding campaign for that same couple, who were asking for money to “relocate” after their video went viral and they were doxxed and “threatened.” The couple set their funding goal at $88,000—a reference, almost assuredly, to “88,” a neo-Nazi code for “Heil Hitler.” This Russian nesting doll of irony-poisoned, loud-and-proud racism is a common experience in the algorithmic fever swamps of X.
It’s worth noting that Ye’s song was banned by other major streaming platforms and social networks. Writing about X, The New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh said, “West has given the platform a kind of exclusive hit single—a song that can be heard almost nowhere else.” Neo-Nazis and trolls expressed a palpable delight that all of this was happening on an ostensibly mainstream platform—wanton hatred not on 4chan or Stormfront, but on the same network where Barack Obama posted a condolence message about Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis. “Heil Hitler” is almost assuredly not the global phenomenon that the fascists on the platform think it is, but its prevalence on X is not nothing either. As Sanneh wrote last week, “We now live in an era when a top musician can distribute a song called ‘Heil Hitler,’ and there’s no way to stop him. That is the true message of this song, which has spread and thrived beyond the reach of boycotts or shaming campaigns: no one is in charge.”
In July 2020, Twitter user Michael B. Tager shared an anecdote that went viral. Tager was at “a shitty crustpunk bar” when the gruff bartender kicked out a patron in a “punk uniform”—not because the customer was making a scene, but because he was wearing Nazi paraphernalia. “You have to nip it in the bud immediately,” Tager recounted the bartender as saying. “These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend.” Soon enough, you’re running a Nazi bar.
The Nazi bar is an apt analogy, yet it doesn’t fully capture the weirdness of a social network and of the strange, modern power of algorithms to sort and segregate experiences. Many people use X merely to post about sports, follow news, or look at dumb memes, and they’re probably having a mostly normal online experience; I don’t have any wish to judge them. To torture the metaphor, though, they’re sitting at a table outside the Nazi bar; their friends are there, they’re having a good time, maybe they hear a slur emanate from the window from time to time. Others fully recognize that they’re at a Nazi bar, but this was their bar first and they don’t want to cede the territory; they’re hanging around to debate, never mind that the bar’s owner is palling around with the new customers.
Of course, with a broadcast social network like X, everyone is both a patron and an owner of sorts. Followers can feel like a kind of currency, built up over years: Some people don’t leave the bar because they’re invested and don’t want to dump their shares. Other people don’t leave because the alternative hangouts aren’t enticing enough. Some simply don’t want to give the Nazis the satisfaction of successfully driving them out. There is plenty of commentary, even among users of other platforms, about how Threads is bloodless (and owned by Mark Zuckerberg), Mastodon is inscrutable, and Bluesky is humorless.
These quibbles make some sense in the brain-rot context of social media, where people have been conditioned to think it’s normal to have interactions with millions of strangers at the same time, but this is not really tenable or healthy. Nor is it something most people would tolerate in the physical world. If a billionaire bought one of your local haunts, renamed it, humiliated the employees, brought back many of the people who’d been banned for harassing other regulars, eliminated basic rules of decency, started having town halls with Republicans and a leader of the AfD, taking your business elsewhere would be perfectly rational. This is essentially what’s happened on X, only the reality is wildly, at times comically, more extreme. A critical mass of the nation’s politicians, news outlets, and major brands regularly post content for free to the exclusive streaming platform for the Ye song “Heil Hitler.” This platform is owned by the world’s richest man, a conspiracy theorizing GOP mega-donor who still holds a position in the Trump administration. Even if he winds down his official role, X will remain an instrument for Musk’s politics. Let’s pause to sit with the absurdity of these facts.
Acknowledging the role X plays in mainstreaming the worst constituencies makes for awkward conversations with those who continue to use it. These discussions grow exhausting, fast. There’s a definite purity-politics flavor to any suggestion that people should take a moral stand and leave a social network, but also a pretty airtight case to be made for boycotting it. There is no ethical consumption under tech oligarchy, etc. You’re not a Nazi simply because you use X—but also, what exactly are you doing there?
You may not have any interest in participating in a culture war. The problem is that on X, everything is a culture war. Culture war is the very point of the MAGA AI slop the platform traffics in and the viscerally cruel White House X account. Culture war is behind Tucker Carlson’s choice to debut his post-Fox show on X and why Alex Jones livestreams on the platform every day. West’s nihilistic neo-Nazi single is an act of culture war: Its message isn’t just that X has energized his ideas, but that the platform renders people like Ye unignorable. Only Musk could shut this machine down, but plenty of others lend it their credibility and happily turn the cranks, ensuring that the culture war grinds on and on.
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