Elon Musk Battles 4Chan: This Will Probably Not End Well
I don’t know if anyone on this platform is following the 4chan/Elon Musk/”Adrian Dittman” drama that blew up this week, but after much look-seeing, here’s my take on it.
Today I spent the morning on /pol/ (4chan’s most racist/horrible board) to get a better sense of it. Turns out those 4chan guys really hate Elon and they have several valid reasons to believe he spends time there saying and doing really stupid things, which we won’t get into. (I submitted that Musk is indeed a beginner-level 4channer in my last book, for the record, so it’s no surprise to me that I was right and that he doesn’t do well there.)
Anyway, the short version is this. Now that all the “evidence” is in, I think “Dittman” had to be either Musk himself or a Musk-hating 4channer posing as Elon, who was in turn posing as Dittman, who, in typical 4chan-trolling manner, “accidentally” revealed that he has “Twitter admin rights.” If that was the case, the 4channer’s idea was to get as many people as possible to trash Musk on social media, because no matter how you slice it, it’s one of the most horrific “sockpuppet” incidents since Peter Coffin’s fake girlfriend. It’s made Elon look like a complete imbecile to anyone paying the slightest bit of mind to this nonsense.
The key to understanding this whole mess is, like I alluded, seeing first-hand how deeply hated Musk is on 4chan (that extends to pretty much everyone on the internet, save for “crypto kiddies” and certain Trump/MAGA cohorts). These days, 4chan’s (larping or not) racists constantly trash Musk for threatening to import more Indian high-tech workers in order to replace US workers, but there’s also a huge crowd of regular blue-collar guys on 4chan who are angry that he exploits workers (like most billionaires do).
Anyhow. Like I said, after getting a good read of what’s going on, sure, there’s a good possibility that “Dittman” was just some everyday /pol/ regular who wanted to make Elon look stupid and cringey. The most compelling evidence I saw for the latter, though I haven’t confirmed it: Some guy actually copped to it on 4chan, posting an alleged “tripcode key” for “Dittman’s” fake 4chan ID and saying he couldn’t believe it had blown up this big. To me it’s either that or Musk screwed up colossally.
What does this all mean? Logic tells us that this little 4chan-vs-Elon war could create an opening for long-overdue solidarity between pro-union leftists and working class right-wingers. They could easily bond on their hatred for Elon’s alleged anti-labor actions (pic shows a tweet from Elon that really pissed off the 4channers — do not try that at home, folks). Unfortunately it’s an opportunity that’ll surely go unseized by both easily distracted sides. As usual. Like with the Luigi Mangione incident, where 70% of respondents in a University of Chicago poll laid much of the blame for Brian Thompson’s murder on the healthcare industry itself.
Tldr; the world’s richest man is a lonely, fucked-up anti-labor greed-Godzilla who partly owns our next president, and 4chan is seriously on his case. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes.
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My second book, My Year In The Online Left, came out on June 10. Meantime, if you want to be fully, genuinely informed about the political troll/bot invasion of Election 2016, 2020, and Elections-Yet-To-Come, buy my previous book. There’s the tiniest bit of technical stuff in there, but you’ll get it, I promise. My Twitter is @esaeger, my Mastodon is @esaeger@universeodon.com (I’m spending a lot more time there now), my BlueSky is @esaeger.bsky.social (ditto) and my cursed Facebook is eric.saeger.9 (I do visit it daily).
