Since acquiring Twitter in 2022, Musk has gutted content moderation and reinstated far-right conspiracy theorists and extremists under the banner of “free speech”. Musk’s own posts have gone from dog-whistle racism to outright and open endorsements of white supremacist conspiracies including the “great replacement” theory. This is now the new culture at X and—despite what Musk and other technocrats will have you believe—the AI technologies that are infiltrating social media are not neutral tools but reflect the data they are trained on and the values of those who build them.
In the case of Grok, that means drawing from a data set that is stewing in the ecosystem of Musk’s increasingly far-right social media platform. This isn’t an accident of code, but because Grok is being trained to reflect and feed into the ideological climate that Elon Musk has cultivated throughout his career. Grok is the algorithmic mirror of fascist creep; an instrument shaped by, and complicit in, its normalization. These AI tools are absorbing and amplifying the reactionary drift of the current political climate, and encoding it into the architecture of everyday language.
The broader project to remake information infrastructure in the image of right wing manifestations of capital isn’t just the problem of Grok, but reflects the authoritarian digital future we are all facing. Despite Elon Musk and other technocrat billionaires marketing themselves as rebels against the establishment, in actuality they are consolidating a new kind of digital authoritarianism under the guise of edgy disruption and “anti-wokeness”. Keeping this in mind, what’s even more troubling is that Musk has promoted X as your source for “everything”: your news source, your banking system, and your AI system. But as each piece of this project is brought under his control, it reveals a vision of society that is increasingly hostile to indigenous people, migrants, and labor, and presents freedom of speech through the lens of complete subservience to the demands of the imperial core. By centralizing news, finance, and AI within a single privatized ecosystem, Musk is not attempting to decentralize power but monopolize it.
What the incidents with Grok reveal is how easily fascist talking points can be sanitized and amplified through the apparatus of so-called innovation. This is a manifestation of right wing populism in the digital age: a billionaire posturing as a renegade, while weaponizing technology in order to go after the most marginalized among us. In “Race After Technology”, sociologist Dr. Ruha Benjamin argues that rather than undermining racial hierarchies, the technology we use in our day to day life reinforces and even deepens them, cloaking racism in the neutral language of codes, databases, and algorithms.
What we are seeing today is the unfolding of what Benjamin describes as “the New Jim Code”: a regime in which technology doesn’t just simply mirror racial and class hierarchies, but encodes them and then hides these structural biases behind the language of technological breakthroughs. AI instruments like Grok aren’t simply complying with user prompts but are doing exactly what they’ve been built to do, which is to automate and launder ideology at the behest of those in power. These are the master’s new tools, and they are being built with code.
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