Elon Musk and the danger to democracy

It’s hard to know where to begin with Elon Musk. Long before he bought Twitter and renamed it X, he was already spreading incendiary misinformation. That included a bizarre witch hunt against the British diver who helped rescue 12 boys and their soccer coach from a cave in Thailand. Musk baselessly accused the man of being a “pedophile dude” after he questioned the underwater rescue vehicle Musk had sent. Musk has since deleted that tweet and others like it. But he continues to add new posts to his growing library of nearly 49,000. In recent days, he has repeatedly commented on the racist riots in Britain. He has predicted an imminent civil war in the U.K., condemned British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer for alleged bias toward non-whites, and suggested that the U.K.’s immigration policies were responsible for the murder of three girls last week in Southport. Posts from figures who were banned under Twitter’s previous administration, such as Tommy Robinson, a British far-right activist who was arrested four times, went viral.

On Thursday, Musk promoted another British far-right figure — Ashlea Simon, the co-founder of Britain First, also a white supremacist splinter group — who claimed that Starmer planned to send British protesters to detention camps in the Falkland Islands. Simon’s post cited a fake Daily Telegraph story with that headline, a story the Telegraph quickly pointed out as fabricated. Musk deleted his tweet, but only after it had racked up about 2 million impressions and without any apology for his mistake. That Musk would be taken in by the lies circulated on the site is mildly ironic; he has shown his gullibility many times before. That he frequently and almost exclusively endorses far-right activists is a cause for genuine concern. Musk claims to be a defender of free speech. With nearly 195 million followers, he is the most influential disinformation purveyor in America. In total, he has made 50 posts since Jan. 1 that have been debunked by independent fact-checkers, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Those posts have been viewed 1.2 billion times. They included a deepfake video purporting to show Kamala Harris calling herself “the ultimate diversity hire.”

A long essay could be devoted to the list of nefarious characters Musk has incited and on what topics. Suffice it to say that his political statements are usually about voter fraud, illegal immigration, race or gender. But this is a newsletter, so I’ll spare sensitive stomachs.

The key question is what, if anything, democracies can do to address the danger posed by Musk. It’s one thing for a newspaper or television station owner to push his biases on his outlets. That’s always happened, and it’s protected speech. Depending on the democracy, there are also laws against the concentration of media ownership. Musk has the greatest legal freedom in the US, where the First Amendment protects almost all speech. Furthermore, internet publishers are exempt from liability under the notorious Section 230 of the misleadingly named Communications Decency Act. But even in America, you can’t falsely shout fire in a crowded theater.

The difference between X and, say, the right-leaning GB News in the UK, or whatever platform far-right radio host Alex Jones is using in America, is that the latter two are isolated outlets. X claims to be the public square. In some ways, people are right to point out that “Twitter is not real life.” It is not. But when racist attackers falsely claim on X that refugees are child killers and then gather to burn down refugee hostels — the site becomes very real. At critical moments, X has become a key vector for potentially lethal and false claims. Its owner endorsing some of them should be a matter of public interest.

Many political leaders, including Starmer, the Irish government, EU commissioners and US senators, have called for an investigation into the role of social media in spreading incendiary disinformation. I have no idea what the best legal remedy would be that would be consistent with democratic values ​​and free speech. But I do know that, whatever he says, Musk is not a fan of either. He revels in conflict and is fascinated by the possibility of collapse. He is a disaster capitalist, a ruthless troll and a brilliant engineer rolled into one. I wrote last year about Musk’s twisted libertarianism. Today, I would be tempted to label him a techno-authoritarian.

Peter, as the author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible and, more recently, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted HitlerI can’t think of anyone better than you to answer the following questions: Should democracies be concerned about Musk? If so, what can they do?

Peter Pomerantsev responds

Ed, you ask the right question: How new is the phenomenon of a tycoon owning a media outlet and treating it like a political plaything?

In a sense, this is nothing new. Murdoch does this all the time. But if we agree that Musk is a publisher, using his platform as such, shouldn’t he be held liable as a publisher? Murdoch’s Fox News had to pay nearly $1 billion in fines for lying about “rigged” voting machines. Of course, social media is different; the owner of the system can’t be held responsible for everything that is said on it, but if it turns out that the design of the platform helps incite violence, spreads lies that cause financial harm — shouldn’t he have a duty of care?

The difference between traditional media and digital platforms is that the former create content, which can be regulated. But platforms don’t so much produce content as build machines that direct, promote, suppress and distribute content in certain ways. It’s this system — sometimes known as an algorithm — that we need to understand.

But to make any kind of judgment about this, we need algorithmic transparency. If this is a public square, we need to understand how it’s designed to understand how it directs discourse. Does it push some people into a basement while giving others a pulpit and a microphone? We need to be able to see inside the black box of X — and other companies, too.

And here we come to the crux of the matter. Freedom of speech is also the right to receive information. And we currently lack information about how Musk — and others — shape our information environment. We are inundated with noise, but we are censored from receiving information about how what we see and how we are heard is controlled and manipulated. We are like Caliban on Prospero’s island, surrounded by strange sounds and distorted speech, unable to understand how this environment is shaped and who it serves. This is not freedom. Or rather — it is the freedom of those who control the platform to manipulate the citizen.

By Edward Luce, for the Financial Times.