Elon Musk. (File photo)
More South Africans arrived in the United States this week. But it is an old resident who made the most headlines.
Elon has left the Doge office. He did so in bizarre pomp and ceremony, with Donald Trump looking to save both their faces with a predictably awkward golden key award ceremony.
Musk and his Javier Milei-inspired chainsaw are no longer a factor in Washington.
The same cannot be said for public life. Musk owns X/Twitter, one of the biggest social media platforms on the planet. He’s had a huge following on it long before he took control in 2022. He relishes using that influence to peddle all manner of absurdity and falsity.
Musk has been the figurehead of the open conspiracy of tech oligarchs that reign in the White House. They have made no secret of their willingness to do whatever is asked of them, knowing that the reciprocation will be ample (or indeed, the punitive repercussions for a failure to toe the line would be grave.)
Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg’s sycophantic about-turn on moderation was a perfect example of that reality playing out in real time. In that now infamous announcement video, he waxed lyrical about how he created Facebook to be a democratic marketplace of free ideas. That is a lie, of course. He created Facebook so college boys could rate women on the internet.
Regardless, with other media and search engine owners included in the cohort, the fact remains that a few powerful men control the dominant means of creating and sharing information in 2025.
Those white South Africans arriving as refugees in the US should be all the reminder we need of how pernicious a narrative can be; and that real-world consequences need not be grounded in truth or rational reasoning. It bears repeating: there is no white genocide in South Africa.
It is imperative that we, as individual news consumers and practitioners, reclaim our information space. For as much as the oligarchs strut with the swagger of impunity, that is far from the case.
While this would be an obvious segue into launching into a pitch to get you to subscribe, the struggle we face goes beyond promoting ideas of established media. There’s a war going on for our attention. The mistake would be in thinking we have to take sides.
We have to respect each other and the process of sharing ideas civilly, with a respect for the truth. If our engagement begins and ends with a retweet, our society will begin to look even bleaker.
The algorithm only wins if you surrender to it.