Society Has A Very Severe Elon Musk Problem That Must Be Dealt With Once And For All

And It's Not Just The Billionaire Thing

One violent slack-jawed moron is already in prison; the other has yet to be dealt with

We’ve often made the case that billionaires— with Elon Musk as the primary example— are incompatible with democracy because of their great wealth— and that they should be taxed out of existence. Part of that, a kind of corollary, is that billionaires have a tendency to try to shape public discourse and influence the political agenda. By buying up pieces of the mass media This control over information leads to biased reporting and the suppression of dissenting voices, hindering an informed electorate and stifling democratic debate. Musk, of course, is a perfect example, but that isn’t exactly what I want to look into today. 

In his Financial Times essay yesterday, Elon Musk Is A Danger To Democracy, Edward Luce noted that even before Musk bough Twitter “he was spreading incendiary disinformation… In the last few days, he has commented repeatedly on the racist riots in Britain. He has forecast a coming UK civil war, condemned Britain’s prime minister Sir Keir Starmer for alleged bias towards non-whites and implied that Britain’s immigration policies were responsible for the murder of three girls last week in Southport. Posts by figures who were banned under Twitter’s previous ownership, such as Tommy Robinson, a fringe and four-times-jailed extreme right British activist, have gone viral.”

On Thursday, Musk promoted another far right British figure— Ashlea Simon, co-founder of Britain First, also a white supremacist splinter group— who claimed Starmer planned to send British rioters to detention camps in the Falkland Islands. Simon’s post cited a fake Daily Telegraph story carrying that headline, a story The Telegraph quickly pointed out was invented. Musk deleted his tweet but only after it had made about 2 million impressions and with no apology for his error. 

That Musk would get duped by lies circulating on the site is mildly ironic; he has revealed his gullibility many times. That he would frequently and almost exclusively endorse fringe far-right activists is a cause for genuine concern. Musk claims to be a champion of free speech. With nearly 195 million followers, he is America’s most influential purveyor of disinformation. In total he has made 50 posts since January 1 that have been debunked by independent fact checkers, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. These were viewed 1.2 billion times. They included a deep fake video that purportedly showed Kamala Harris calling herself “the ultimate diversity hire.” 

A long essay could be devoted to the litany of nefarious characters Musk has incited and on which subjects. Suffice to say his political statements are generally about voting fraud, illegal immigration, race or gender…  

The key question is what, if anything, democracies can do to address the danger from Musk. It is one thing having a newspaper proprietor, or the owner of a television station, pushing their biases in their outlets. This has always happened and it is protected speech. Depending on the democracy, there are also laws against concentration of media ownership. Musk has freest legal rein in the US, where the First Amendment protects almost all speech. Moreover, internet publishers are exempt from liability under the notorious Section 230 of the misleadingly named Communications Decency Act. But even in America you cannot falsely shout fire in a crowded theatre. 

The difference between Twitter and say the right-leaning GB News in the UK, or whatever platform the far-right radio host Alex Jones is using in America, is that the latter two are siloed channels. Twitter claims to be the public square. In some respects, people are right to point out that “Twitter is not real life.” It isn’t. But when racist thugs falsely learn on Twitter that refugees are child killers then gather to burn down refugee hostels— the site becomes all too real. At critical moments, Twitter has become a key vector for potentially lethal untrue assertions. That its owner would endorse some of them ought to be a matter of public interest. 

Many political leaders, including Starmer, the Irish government, EU commissioners, and US senators, have called for an inquiry into social media’s role in spreading incendiary disinformation. I have no idea what the best legal remedy would be that was consistent with democratic and free speech values. I do know, however, that whatever he says, Musk is no fan of either. He revels in conflict and is fascinated by the possibility of collapse. He’s a disaster capitalist, a vicious troll and a brilliant engineer rolled into one. I wrote last year about Musk’s warped libertarianism. Today I would be tempted to label him a techno-authoritarian.

Before going to sleep on Friday night I was reading about the government response to the right-wing riots in Britain and tweeted this:

I was impressed that 2 of the right-wing influencers had already been arrested, tried and sent to prison— something that took days in Britain that would take over a year in the U.S. One, “Tyler Kay, 26, was given three years and two months in prison for posts on Twitter that called for mass deportation and for people to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers.” In sentencing one of them, the judge noted that although he took no part in the rioting itself, “There can be no doubt you were inciting others to do so. You went on to say that you did not want your money going to immigrants who rape our kids and get priority. You were encouraging others to attack a hotel which you knew was occupied by refugees and asylum seekers.” 

If they are arresting people for incitement, Musk should be Target One. I noticed when I woke up that Jonathan Freedland had posted a column later Friday night calling for Musk to be tried. He admires the government for taking quick action against “so many of those responsible for a week of terrifying far-right violence… but there’s one extremely rich and powerful suspect who should join them in the dock. If the UK authorities truly want to hold accountable all those who unleashed riots and pogroms in Britain, they need to go after Elon Musk.” As poet William Mountfort wrote in 1697— and then Sting later— be still my beating heart.

“[D]irect guilt,” he readily acknowledged, “belongs to the culprits on the ground, those currently being fast-tracked in their hundreds through a usually glacial court system— moving from arrest to charges, trial, conviction and (heavy) sentencing in a matter of days. Guilt belongs to those who surrounded hotels housing migrants and refugees, attempting to set them on fire and threatening to kill those inside. It belongs to those who saw fit to trash and loot not only shops, but also libraries and advice centers, many of them lifelines for those who have next to nothing. It belongs to those who smashed and threatened mosques, terrifying those within and whole Muslim communities beyond with a kind of menace many will have heard about in stories passed down from parents or grandparents, but which they will have hoped belonged to a long ago past.”

And yet, consider how all this happened. It began as it always begins, with a lie— in this case, the lie that the wicked stabbing attack on a children’s dance party in Southport, which left three little girls dead, was the work of a Muslim migrant who had come to Britain on a small boat. I say “always” because this kind of lie has been told for the best part of a thousand years.

In 1144, it wasn’t Southport but Norwich, and the victim was a 12-year-old boy called William. When he was found dead, the accusing finger pointed instantly— and falsely— at the city’s Jews. Over the centuries that followed, the defamatory charge of child murder— the blood libel— would be hurled against Jews repeatedly, often as the prelude to massacre.

…News of the murders in Southport had barely broken when that false claim about the alleged killer’s identity began coursing through the veins of the internet, advancing virally across social media. It was not organised by one of the official groups of the far right, which remain tiny and fragmented. Nor is there much evidence that it was directed by a malign state actor, with a shadowy facility in St Petersburg pulling the strings. Its method, and that is the wrong word, was different— and much more effective.

“This was individuals, acting individually and anonymously,” says Joe Mulhall of Hope Not Hate, which has long monitored the far right. All of them were doing their own thing, but the overall result was collective movement in one direction, “like a school of fish.”

What gave the phenomenon scale were the “super-sharers,” big-name figures with large online followings who act as “nodes” for the dissemination of lies. Witness the role of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who styles himself Tommy Robinson, and Andrew Tate, both of whom amplified the initial bogus claim. Thanks to them, it was seen by millions. As Mulhall notes, these are people capable of making the weather: “One individual can create a mass panic.”

It has become a habit to speak of social media generically, but the core of the problem is more specific. It’s Twitter. That’s where “Robinson” has nearly a million followers. When he was banned from Twitter and other mainstream platforms, he had to make do with the likes of Telegram, where his reach was more limited. “He was in the wilderness,” says Mulhall. Now that he’s back on Twitter, he can find his way into the phones of tens or even hundreds of millions of people at a stroke. And what happens online carries over into the real world, as we saw at the end of last month, when Robinson addressed a crowd estimated to be in the tens of thousands at Trafalgar Square— and saw again this week.

Let’s remind ourselves who brought Robinson and a whole slew of far-right agitators back in from the cold, thereby putting Twitter out of step with the likes of YouTube and Facebook. It was Musk, of course. He decided to make Twitter a safe space for racism and hate almost as soon as he bought it. The effect was instant. One analysis of tweets found a “nearly 500% increase in use of the N-word in the 12-hour window immediately following the shift of ownership to Musk.” The same study also found that posts including “the word ‘Jew’ had increased fivefold since before the ownership transfer,” and something tells me those tweets weren’t tributes to the comic style of Mel Brooks.

But Musk has not just ushered in the super-sharers of the far right: he is one himself. It was he, on his own Twitter account, who shared with his 193 million followers a fake Telegraph headline, falsely claiming that Keir Starmer planned to create “detainment camps” for rioters in the Falkland Islands, and doing it by quote-tweeting the co-leader of the ultra far-right Britain First organisation. It was Musk who inflamed an already incendiary situation by tweeting of the UK, “Civil war is inevitable.”

What’s the answer to this problem? Ideally, all politicians, journalists and influencers would defect en masse from Twitter and use somewhere else as the global exchange for instant news and opinion. So far that’s presented a collective action problem: even governments who loathe Twitter don’t want to leave while it remains a central forum. [You can find DWT at BlueSKy, Spoutible and Threads.]

…[A]s Lies That Kill, a timely new book by Elaine Kamarck and Darrell West argues, given that this is a global problem, it will require a global solution: which “means that countries need to negotiate with each other on ways to cooperate in the fight against disinformation.” If 2025 sees Starmer sit down with a President Kamala Harris, this should be one of the first items on the agenda.

For now, though, there needs to be clarity on the nature of the problem. Lies can indeed kill and, though there are of course many others, one of the world’s most prolific enemies of truth is Elon Musk. He is surely the global far right’s most significant figure, and he holds the world’s largest megaphone. As he may put it, a battle to defeat him is now inevitable— and it has to be won.

Allan Rushbridger couldn’t agree more: Musk is an arsonist with a huge box of matches— we need political leaders to stand up. “It’s good business for Musk,” he wrote. “The Center for Countering Digital hate estimates that just 10 of the extremist accounts re-instated by Musk— including Andrew Tate and Andrew Anglin, a US neo-Nazi— generated up to $19 million in advertising revenue through 2.5 billion tweet impressions… Regulation has, to date at least, not done much to curb Musk’s enthusiasm for amplifying lies and hatred on his platform. He’s an arsonist with a huge box of matches— and he’s having too much fun… The respected Financial Times columnist Edward Luce tweeted this week: ‘Can’t say this enough; Elon Musk’s menace to democracy is intolerable. He’s using the largest & most influential platform in the democratic world to stoke racial conflict and civil breakdown— in his own posts & what X promotes. Democracies can no longer ignore this.’… Luce is right. This is a problem that can no longer be ignored.”