Elon Musk’s right to ding media. That doesn’t mean boosting crackpots

Elon Musk has many reasons to be skeptical of the legacy media: its many screwups on COVID, its refusal to engage seriously with the Hunter Biden corruption story. 

But that doesn‘t justify his counter-signaling by promoting the numerous crackpots that use his social-media site.

Like a since-deleted tweet saying that “For following the [Israel/Hamas] war in real-time, @WarMonitors and @sentdefender are good.”

Ah, no: @WarMonitors is a pro-Palestine account that once tweeted “mind your own business, jew” at Morton-Williams co-owner Avi Kaner. 

An ugly sentiment, but not at all unusual among pro-Palestinians (or on Twitter, now called X, at large). 

The trouble is that when Musk — who owns the platform and a man whose tweets move markets — tells his nearly 160 million followers to check out a feed like that, it sends a powerful message.

Musk gets this, of course, which is why he deleted the tweet and then took @warmonitors to task subsequently. 

But this is just the latest in a series of questionable replies and boosts. 

He responded positively to an account suggesting COVID is simply misdiagnosed flu (it’s not). 

He pumped up a story suggesting that Paul Pelosi’s attacker, a crazed homeless man, was actually a male prostitute Pelosi had hired. 

He replied to a tweet falsely claiming thousands of NATO troops had died in the Ukraine war. 

Look, we share Musk’s skepticism. And all the usual suspects — liberal journos and Dem political apparatchiks — who scream “disinformation” are literally the last people in the world with any right to criticize. 

But Musk is one of the richest and most powerful people alive and the most followed account on the site, not some no-name rando posting from the hip. 

His endorsement carries extra weight.

And he knows it; he apologizes when he gets things wrong. 

But he needs to take care that his justified effort to hold the media’s collective feet to the fire doesn’t become counterproductive.