How much influence do far-right accounts have on Elon Musk’s perception of Europe? Quite a lot, as the French newspaper Le Monde has pointed out in a recent article. Jan Rau was interviewed as an expert on the topic of “the extreme right and social media”. The article shows how a few accounts on the platform shape Musk’s view of Europe through selectively curated, often anti-migrant and anti-Islamic content. These accounts include, for example, “RadioGenoa” and “Peter Sweden”, which present European events in English from a profoundly ideological perspective.
Jan Rau is quoted on the case of Naomi Seibt, whom Musk helped organize a public conversation with Alice Weidel (AfD). “She is one of the few personalities in this milieu to have first gained her audience on an international level. The vast majority of important figures in the German or Austrian extreme right first became known locally and through publications in German,” Rau told Le Monde.