The Data Dam Break of May 2023: How Twitter Challenged the Racial Industrial Complex

Image by Midjourney

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but data is not racist, yet many people certainly seem to think it is. Since I became active on Twitter last year I have sensed a stigma around discussing the data surrounding specific uncomfortable topics such as racial crime disparities. Many threads that merely share statistics around such disparities regularly have commenters hurling ad-hominems at the original poster. A consequence of this has been allowing the dominant narratives of the Racial Industrial Complex to go unchallenged which gave the Legacy Media room to spread racial propaganda without significant opposition.

To give an idea of the effect racial propaganda has had, quite a few liberals think the number of unarmed black men killed by police officers numbers in the thousands when the true number is closer to 10. We have also seen a demoralizing effect on African Americans:

• 2012: 30% of Blacks cite racism as a primary detriment to success.

• 2021: 68% of Blacks cite racism as a primary detriment to success.

During a period when racial messaging increased and many attempts to challenge the narrative resulted in stigmatization.

Perhaps due to the stigma, analyses of data contrary to mainstream narratives have been limited, with Twitter accounts, like an accurately named, “The Missing Data Depot”, independently working on producing reliable information. After the events of the past week (this article was written on May 11, 2023), the stigma around such inconvenient data might be beginning to lift. This past week the Data Dam Burst and information pieces that were once aggressively censored, and sometimes resulted in social media bans, were shown to the wider public.

On May 6th Elon Musk replied to a tweet from End Wokeness. To provide some context, Legacy Media has a tendency to over-focus on incidents involving white offenders and black victims.

After George Floyd:

• White offenders were mentioned more.

• Black offenders were mentioned less.

In other words: White-on-Black homicides get more focus than Black-on-White homicides. What are the true numbers? In 2020, there were:

• 876 White-on-Black homicides

• 1,877 Black-on-White homicides

The graphic Musk was responding to pokes fun at Legacy Media’s selection bias present (which is at odds with reality) when reporting the news.

Naturally, both the viral tweet itself and Musk’s response triggered a panicked response from several high-profile individuals including AOC who inspired the below comic from Wokely Correct that simultaneously pokes fun at Legacy Media’s selection bias and the defensive response when people notice the aforementioned selection bias:

Normally, when people receive such large backlash online they back down. Luckily Elon Musk did not. Instead, he continued to respond to data inconvenient to the mainstream narrative.

I posted a tweet sharing information from Fentasyl pointing out that different groups have different pathologies:

• Whites kill themselves

• Blacks kill each other

Elon Musk responded to that tweet as well which prompted more backlash and inspired quite a few colorful messages to be directed at us including people wishing death on Elon. Despite the death threats, Musk continued to interact with important crime data.

Monitoring Bias posted homicide data indicating 60.4% of murders are committed by Blacks which got two replies from Musk:

• The first reply was asking a fair question on data accuracy

• The second reply was to a commenter

Not deterred by the tumultuous weekend, Musk continued to reply to data. Below is a tweet I shared of data generated by Crémieux.

In the above, Elon voices concern about rising interracial homicide rates. He then went on to quote a tweet I had made of a graph generated by David Rozado noting the massive public manipulation occurring due to the rising racialized language coming out of Legacy Media outlets.

He then echoed the concerns of rising racialized language in our media discourse in another reply to a stat discussing interracial murders as seen below.

Elon’s message in response to the above is important to note: through dishonest reporting Legacy Media is effectively stoking the fires of hatred and our race relations have tanked as a result.

As Wilfred Reilly noted, the statistics people were calling Elon Musk a racist over are merely real pieces of crime data.

The panicked response over Elon helping shed light on these issues tells me that: People in Legacy Media were not worried about Elon Musk buying Twitter to spread misinformation; people in Legacy Media were worried about Elon Musk buying Twitter to spread accurate information. Collectively, the data shared over the weekend amassed perhaps hundreds of millions of impressions. The impressions were driven by replies from Elon Musk, people cross-posting the information on other platforms off of Twitter like Reddit and TikTok, and also thanks to Legacy Media apologists acting as useful idiots by sharing screenshots of the data that accompanied their poor critiques. In the past week, Elon Musk has shown more intellectual curiosity by simply asking questions and engaging with data via the Socratic Method than many corporate journalists display in their entire careers. Twitter is a Citizen Media driven platform and Elon Musk is leading Citizen Journalists by example.

Many of us went in anonymously armed with toothpicks against a much better-resourced authoritarian censorship regime and are collectively dealing death blows against the Establishment Ideology of the Racial Industrial Complex. Discussions once limited to the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), are being mainstreamed. We are refocusing these conversations to be centered around facts, data, and logic in order to create a firm foundation rooted in reality. The Overton Window of Discourse has expanded and the Data Dam has Burst.