Why is Elon Musk boosting an anti-immigrant film loved by the far right? | Mehdi Hasan

Elon Musk has long described himself as a “centrist”. He likes to pretend that he hasn’t changed his views; it’s the Democrats who have lurched to the left. He’s merely a free speech advocate; a self-styled “moderate” resisting the excesses of the “woke mind virus”.

But when you pay attention to his actual digital footprint – the tweets, the retweets, the algorithmic amplification – a very different, much darker picture emerges. The world’s richest person clearly isn’t interested in cultivating a neutral marketplace of ideas; rather, he has turned Twitter/X into a platform where far-right and racist content is repeatedly rewarded and amplified.

Consider the latest evidence. The would-be trillionaire spent the past few days, including Sunday, his birthday, breathlessly promoting Citizen Vigilante.

Citizen what? You’re forgiven if you haven’t heard of the new movie from the German film-maker Uwe Boll, frequently described as “the world’s worst director”. A Variety review dismissed it as an “astonishingly bad”, “incoherent”, “morally bankrupt” film with “no plot”.

But it isn’t simply another low-budget revenge thriller. It’s 90 minutes of unabashed far-right political propaganda.

Its protagonist, Michal Sanders – played by the controversial actor Armie Hammer – is a well-tailored US landlord living in Europe who embarks on a campaign of extrajudicial executions after a series of crimes committed by migrants. The film depicts brown-skinned migrant communities as inherently violent and predatory while portraying vigilantism by white people as a necessary, righteous, even heroic response.

The wooden dialogue is filled with far-right messaging. Migrants supposedly bring an “archaic value system”. European civilization is “falling apart and dying”. Sanders warns a police officer that unless politicians stop the migrant “takeover”, “we the people will end it ourselves.”

By the end of the film, Sanders has murdered judges and police officers he considers collaborators. Then comes the horrific finale: the cold-blooded execution of an entire Muslim migrant family – a husband, wife, son and daughter. His justification? The son committed rape and his family members covered for him. “I don’t think it was the good ones that got out of your country,” Sanders tells the father moments before he shoots him: “I think it was the bad ones.”

Germany’s film ratings authority refused to classify the movie, in effect preventing its commercial release. The director said: “I was told that the film was inciting violence against migrants.” Is it any surprise that it didn’t receive a commercial release in Germany? And yet Elon Musk, one of the most powerful donors to the governing party of the United States, looked at this film, and its chilling ending, and decided it deserved one of the biggest promotional boosts he could give it.

He shared the entire movie for free on X, giving it his seal of approval while retweeting multiple accounts – including the leader of Germany’s far-right AfD party – endorsing the film’s message.

Musk, remember, isn’t just another celebrity posting random “hot takes”. He literally owns the most influential social media platform in the world. He owns the platform and has extraordinary influence over its rules, incentives and what his own 240 million followers see.

It’s hard to see this as accidental. Consider his retweet of a rightwing account that approvingly noted how Sanders murders white people in the movie before turning his gun on brown migrants, and declared: “Always hang a traitor before you shoot an enemy.” Or his retweet of another rightwing account that described the vigilante murder of migrant criminals and their families as the “moderate response”.

Does anyone seriously think this kind of amplification is harmless? That such social media messages of this kind have no dangerous real-world consequences. The anti-migrant “great replacement” conspiracy, which began online, has inspired terrorists from Christchurch, New Zealand, to Buffalo, New York. Anti-Muslim demonization across social media has been linked to mosque attacks and alleged hate crimes, from San Diego, California, to Edinburgh, Scotland.

To be clear: no one is suggesting that Elon Musk is personally responsible for every act committed by every extremist. But influential people have to take responsibility for what they choose to highlight, amplify, legitimize.

Imagine, for a moment, the reverse scenario.

Imagine the world’s most prominent Muslim used a platform they owned to promote a film celebrating violent revenge against white Europeans.

Imagine the protagonist’s targets were explicitly targeted because they were white, Christian or Jewish.

Would that Muslim public figure be defended as a champion of free speech?

Would they be praised for challenging political correctness and government censorship?

Of course not.

There would be wall-to-wall outrage. Accusations of radicalization. Demands for criminal investigations.

And yet not only has there been no chorus of condemnation or criticism of Musk’s reckless promotion of Citizen Vigilante in the New York Times, the Washington Post or CNN, but there has been no coverage of it whatsoever.

As is so often the case, the billionaire CEO gets a pass.

And this was no isolated episode.

The elevation of Citizen Vigilante comes just a few weeks after the brutal stabbing of a local man in Northern Ireland, allegedly by a Sudanese migrant, which was followed by anti-immigrant rioting and violence by mobs of masked men.

Musk “used the incident to amplify violent migrant narratives inspiring calls for violence, with little apparent consequence on the platform”, concluded a report from the non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate, which pointed out how Musk’s posts about the stabbing and the riots – including his quote-tweeting of the Islamophobic thug Tommy Robinson’s inflammatory posts – obtained more than 64m views. As NBC News reported at the time, Michelle O’Neill, the first minister of Northern Ireland, slammed “the Elon Musks of this world”, who she said were “sitting right comfy in their homes, orchestrating hate and tension”.

When the richest person on the planet, who owns one of the biggest social media platforms, spends his days and nights, even his own birthday, amplifying anti-migrant rhetoric, boosting far-right agitators, and promoting films that glorify vigilante violence as the answer to migration, he is not starting a debate – he is starting a fire.

He is legitimizing ideas and actions that were, until very recently, considered beyond the pale.

The effect is to signal to agitators, xenophobes and bigots that their anti-migrant instincts are being validated by one of the world’s most powerful men.

But whatever you do, don’t call him an extremist.

• Mehdi Hasan is a broadcaster and author, and a former host on MSNBC. He is also a Guardian US columnist and the editor-in-chief of Zeteo