Twitter promotes Nazi groups so it's time to say goodbye

As Twitter further plunges into the far-right cesspool, a line needs to be drawn once ads for the National Socialist Network start to appear, writes Tom Tanuki.

I’M CONSTANTLY renegotiating my relationship with social media. I’m not writing yet another article about “digital detoxes” here, so I don’t mean as an individual — even if that thought has weighed on our minds for a decade as our collective relationship with big tech and social media has grown heavier and more extractive.

(It’s been years since I used big tech social media platforms to post personal details about my private life, in any event. Being an open book and also a fringe political commentator is just a recipe for doxxing and disaster.)

But these are still ongoing considerations I make as a public political content creator, albeit one with a reduced posting rate now that I’m a reformed social media addict (or a “washed influencer”, you might say). Stay and post? Hoping I’ll catch more ears and change minds? Or just log off, as big tech platforms increasingly go public with their agenda as morally bankrupt far-right surveillance-capitalist behaviour-modification traps?

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This tension fuelled a discussion on the podcast I co-host with Celeste Liddle, Mitch Alexander and Purple Pingers, the Radical Online Leftist Pipeline. (Please listen, if you don’t yet.)

Mitch reckons we should all log off and organise elsewhere. I can agree with that. Pingers reckons it’s best to stay and change minds where you can. His successful campaigning and platform to date are a testament to the fact that this is a possibility, so I agree with him, too.

I basically said I could go either way.

I think we live in Clown World now. Clowns run the show; clowns dominate the discourse. I’ve been Clown World-ready for many years; I’m accustomed to navigating far-right social and communications platforms loaded with clowns, since long before they all took over. I’ve got the Gab accounts, the Truth Social accounts, and so on.

Mostly I just lurk for info, or use sock accounts. But I also utilise them: I have an Odysee account, for example, which is a predominantly Nazi-populated video platform. I use it to occasionally upload the kind of videos about the Far-Right that would be instantly removed from platforms like YouTube, either due to bot scrapes removing material deemed extremist or because “free speech essentialist” far-right influencers have filed censorious defamation complaints to remove my work.

With every month that passes, big tech social media platforms grow measurably more like the aforementioned far-right fringe platforms. Elon Musk already completed his transition into a publicly hyper-partisan far-right tyrant and his acquisition reflects his shift; beyond the election of Donald Trump, we’re watching Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg rapidly follow suit.

Zuckerberg is rapidly digging up the ground gained with post-Christchurch massacre social media reforms that Meta, among other big tech platforms, signed up for to stay the tide of racist hate speech that was then understood to be inciting deadly White supremacist violence.

How long does it take to forget the dead and those yet to die? Now we know: About four years, give or take.

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I think the current social media landscape looks a lot like the 2018 pre-Christchurch White nationalist wave, as someone who was around and paying close attention throughout it all. Except now the wave is many times bigger, in part because nobody believes in curating scumbags out of the town square anymore.

We ceded a lot here — not only a sometimes too-strident discussion on “deplatforming” but even any notion of who should be allowed to lead our discourse. It’s all been replaced by reductive notions of “free speech”, as though nobody ought ever to curate what standards their community agrees on. Now we blithely let an army of rapist racist paedophiles dominate our public discourse for money. Such is our Clown World.

Good people still need organising together, even in Clown World — like Purple Pingers said. I really do agree.

But, as an anti-fascist, I reckon I draw the line at receiving regular personalised ads on Twitter for the National Socialist Network (NSN).

Melbourne unionist Sarah Haar collated a few of them on Twitter, understandably shocked and angered by it.

I have to say I didn’t bat an eyelid (much) when I first saw one. Of course it’s an NSN ad, I thought. Twitter has been gutted. There are no internal protections left guarding what standards the platform does and doesn’t adhere to; Musk went on a recriminatory spate of banning bulk neo-Nazi and groyper accounts when they popularly ganged up against him on his stance in support of H1B work visas (he wants to hire cheap Indian labour, but they are all too racist for any Indians at all).

But that isn’t a consistent standard of Musk's. He has none and nor does he continue to employ people in charge of policing any standards. So now neo-Nazis get to advertise to us all on there.

On Twitter, Sarah discussed the possibility of legal recrimination for allowing advertising to take place in Australia of this nature. I’ve seen this talk and I understand it, but I’ve lost any faith in our ability to manage those kinds of laws responsibility. Laws concerning “extremism” appear uniformly focused on eliminating our right to protest now; if it isn’t a law that would appear to publicly curtail neo-Nazi political expression while also by extension curtailing left-wing and anti-Zionist activism, I don’t think it would get a look in right now.

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Twitter has always been a platform with a tiny population packing an outsized punch, particularly in Australia. Basically, nobody really used it, but those that did included prominent news outlets and journalists, subject matter specialists, politicians and activists. That’s what was useful about the platform as a news source.

But Musk’s demolition of the blue check system meant that many of those people vanished from sight or were replaced, in both my feed and the replies, with an army of useless foaming-at-the-mouth incels. I can’t keep abreast of anything there anymore unless it’s what the Far-Right is currently on about. So its use to me is now limited to equivalent to having a sock account on Gab. Lurking and screenshotting.

And while this isn’t about social media use as an individual, I’ve had to be honest with myself that being on there has had a deleterious effect on my productivity. I continue to log in to the app we used to regard as a social media news app, but now it’s run by Nazi-adjacent propagandists and I get daily ads for local Nazi groups on it.

So using it in the old way is not good for my mindset, I think, nor my efficiency as a political content creator. It gives me nothing; it makes me slightly more miserable and inert, if anything.

No big performative “I’m leaving Twitter!” posts on the platform. That’s just more reach and endorphin-harvesting, I reckon. I think I’ll just post links to my other social sites and then, quietly, delete the app from my phone. Leave it on the computer so I can lurk — all it’s now good for.

It’s a shit digital life we live — very extractive, and one designed primarily to turn us and our data into a commodity. If it seems to be exhausting to be online, it’s because it is. We are being milked all day for our value. I think it’s good to remove outdated or unhelpful nodes from the archipelago of social media sites that we have increasingly come to regard as the home of our digital selves.

I have to do it, I’ve realised, in order to continue to contribute productively to the Left.

Tom Tanuki is an IA columnist, a writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist whose weekly videos commenting on the Australian political fringe appear on YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter/X @tom_tanuki.