Extremist Musk Repeatedly Promotes QAnon 'Influencer' On Twitter

Musk also tagged Twitter’s community notes multiple times in Kanekoa’s replies — referring to the platform's crowdsourced, volunteer-driven fact-checking system which asks users to add context to a tweet and then vote on the most helpful additions. Notably, this feature is not actually a stand-in for rigorous, in-house content moderators — many of whom Musk has fired.

The Twitter CEO’s interactions with Kanekoa’s tweets have been correlated with a boost in the QAnon influencer’s engagement, as the tweets that Musk has replied to have gotten far more engagement than is typical for the account. At time of publication, Kanekoa has earned an average of more than 7,500 retweets for each tweet Musk has replied to — or more than 159,000 retweets in total. This is more than four times as many retweets as Kanekoa’s average of over 1,700 retweets for all of the account’s tweets since it was reinstated.

Kanekoa has even hyped Musk’s interactions with their tweets, calling it “the Elon Musk stamp of approval,” and other supporters in the QAnon community have also praised and hyped Musk as an ally.

Musk interacting with Kanekoa, a QAnon influencer who was reinstated on the platform under his management, is part of a larger pattern of the new CEO boosting right-wing content and extremism. Since taking over the platform, Musk has reinstated dozens of extremist and misinformation-peddling accounts on the platform and interacted with far-right accounts hundreds of times, while also firing content moderation staff and weakening content moderation policies. The platform has subsequently lost hundreds of millions in advertising revenue.