For years, it's been a tirelessly harped refrain from Republican politicians in the US, led by Donald Trump: Silicon Valley is a den of leftists, who censor conservatives on social media and campaign for the Democrats.

But for several months now, this tired and unsubstantiated argument has disappeared from the language of the former American president and his supporters. And for good reason: X, formerly Twitter, is now flying the Republican flag. Boss Elon Musk explicitly wrote that he "fully endorses" Trump, hours after the latter was the target of an assassination attempt. He has also set up a "Super PAC," a "political action committee" to collect donations to support Trump's campaign, although he insists that the figures revealed by the press about a personal donation of $45 million a month until the election are false.

While the bosses of Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, and Alphabet-Google have been repeatedly grilled by Republican members of parliamentary investigative committees, demanding proof of their political neutrality, Musk has never been asked to explain himself. Republican politicians are now keeping a low profile on the issue of supposed Silicon Valley bias, especially since several big names in San Francisco venture capital, most of them close to the owner of X and Peter Thiel, have publicly taken a stand for Trump. Their criticisms are now directed more to the big generative artificial intelligence (AI) services, like ChatGPT or Bard, accused of being "woke," or more broadly progressive. Except, of course, Grok, the AI owned by Musk, which Musk presents as "anti-woke."

For several weeks now, the X boss has been stepping up provocations against Democrats, and signaling that he's quite ready to bend his social network's own rules in support of Trump. On July 26, for example, he republished a video using images from a Kamala Harris campaign clip, commented on by a voice imitating that of the candidate to make her say she's only running because "Joe Biden finally exposed his senility at the debate" and attacking her credentials. Seen more than 100 million times, this deepfake is nonetheless likely to contravene the rules of the social media network, which generally prohibits this type of content, except in cases of obvious satire.

"Manipulating a voice in an 'ad' like this one should be illegal," said California's governor, the influential Democrat Gavin Newsom. "I’ll be signing a bill in a matter of weeks to make sure it is [in California]." The answer from Musk, who just announced that X's headquarters would be moving from San Francisco and California to Austin, Texas was: "I checked with renowned world authority, Professor Suggon Deeznutz, and he said parody is legal in America."

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