Twitter CEO Elon Musk has been compared to Hitler’s former chief of propaganda by a German current affairs programme over his self-professed pro-free speech stance.
A comedic current affairs show aired by the German state-owned broadcaster ZDF has compared Elon Musk to Joseph Goebbels, the former chief propaganda for the Nazi party, over the Twitter CEO’s self-proclaimed pro-freedom of speech stance.
Since buying the platform late last month, Musk has come under sustained fire from left-wing activists and the legacy media, which have openly voiced disdain for the billionaire’s plan to make the platform more open.
Such criticisms appear to have reached a new and bizarre zenith on Friday after the German Today Show, a satirical programme that deals with current affairs, appeared to compare Musk to Goebbels in an image posted on the tech entrepreneur’s very own social media platform.
In the image, Musk is depicted wearing a brown shirt and standing in front of a number of banners familiar from history, bar from the fact that the swastika on the flags has been replaced by a Twitter logo.
The image’s caption “Do You want total tweets??” has also been linked by German newspaper Bild to Goebbels’ infamous “Sportpalast Speech”, during which the senior Nazi official asked a large crowd of supporters “Do you want total war?”.
The post itself reads: “Thanks to Elon Musk, everyone can now say anything on Twitter again! Total freedom of expression!”
While most comparisons between modern figures and historical Nazis are often misguided, the comparison between Musk and Goebbels is made rendered particularly bizarre by the latter’s specific role in the Nazi regime.
As the head of the German Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda, it was Goebbels in particular who was responsible for the mass censorship and speech control that took place in Germany, with news outlets being banned from publishing stories critical of the government.
“No matter how you feel about Elon Musk, but this public law Nazi comparison is just tasteless and clearly goes too far,” one German parliamentary MP, Florian Hahn, remarked, saying that a German publicly funded broadcaster, in particular, should know better.
Another politician, Christoph de Vries, described the image as being “anything but funny”, slamming the parallel being drawn as “completely wrong”.
“You don’t have to agree with Musk’s commitment to freedom of expression, but a comparison to Nazism, where people were killed for dissenting opinions, is completely wrong – even for a satirical show,” the Bundestag member said.
Meanwhile, one netizen replied to the post noting that Elon Musk had predicted that the legacy media would react extremely badly to the changes he is looking to make to Twitter, as such changes could threaten their business model.
“As Twitter pursues the goal of elevating citizen journalism, media elite will try everything to stop that from happening,” Musk remarked.
“Mainstream media will still thrive, but increased competition from citizens will cause them to be more accurate, as their oligopoly on information is disrupted,” he went on to say.
While Musk’s crusade on Twitter may be, on the face of it, commendable in practice it has veered towards the chaotic, if not outright shambolic. The move to rollout bluetick verification marks more widely was suspended last week after trolls used the newfound freedom to imitate personals and businesses, rather making a mockery of the idea of verification.