Elon Musk and the Danger to Democracy

It’s hard to know where to start with Elon Musk. Long before he bought Twitter and rebranded it X, he was spreading inflammatory disinformation. That included a bizarre witch hunt against the British diver who helped rescue 12 boys and their soccer coach from a Thai cave. Without any basis, Musk accused the man of being a “pedophile” aVsceker he questioned the submersible rescue vessel Musk had delivered. 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 impending civil war in the UK, condemned British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer for alleged bias against non-whites, and implied that Britain’s immigration policies were responsible for the murders of three young girls in Southport last week. Posts by figures who were banned under Twitter’s previous ownership, such as Tommy Robinson, a fringe and four-time jailed British far-right activist, have gone viral.

On Thursday, Musk promoted another British far-right figure, Ashlea Simon, co-founder of Britain First, also a white supremacist splinter group, who claimed Starmer had planned to send British rioters to detention camps in the Falkland Islands. Simon’s post cited a fake Daily Telegraph article with that headline, a story the Telegraph quickly pointed out was fabricated. Musk deleted her tweet, but only aVsceker it had garnered about 2 million impressions and without apology for his mistake.

That Musk has fallen for the lies circulating on the site is mildly ironic; he has revealed his gullibility many times. That he has oVsceken and almost exclusively supported fringe far-right activists is 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 misinformation. In total, he has published 50 posts since January 1 that have been debunked by independent fact checkers, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. These have been viewed 1.2 billion times. They included a deep fake video purporting to show Kamala Harris calling herself “the ultimate diversity hire.”

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

The key question is what, if anything, democracies can do to address the Musk threat. It’s one thing to have a newspaper or TV station owner push their own biases into their channels. That’s always happened, and it’s protected speech. Depending on the democracy, there are also laws against concentrated media ownership. Musk has more legal freedom in the United States, where the First Amendment protects nearly all speech. Internet publishers are also exempt from liability under the infamous Section 230 of the misleadingly named Communications Decency Act. But even in America, you can’t falsely cry fire in a crowded theater.

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

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

Peter, as the author of Nothing is true and everything is possibleand, more recently, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outsmarted HitlerI couldn’t think of anyone better than you to answer the following questions: Should democracies care about Musk? If so, what can they do?

Recommended reading

• My column this week examines Kamala Harris’s choice of Tim Walz as her running mate: the happy blue-collar warrior Kamala Harris. “Republicans will try to paint Walz as a classic liberal who wants to regulate people’s lives,” I write. “You only have to listen to him for a minute to understand how difficult that will be. His manner is about as far from the Berkeley-Boston elites as a progressive can get.”

• My colleagues Jennifer Williams and William Wallis have written an instructive account of the anti-racist demonstrations that have erupted across the UK this week in disgust at the violence. According to Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, 70 percent of the most violent protesters in Whitehall had criminal records. The overlap between political extremism and the criminal world is nothing new. But it will hasten the sentencing of those who deserve to go to prison.

• Finally, my colleague Jemima Kelly wrote about the other VP pick, J.D. Vance, and why Trump is so hard to play.

Join US financial commentator Robert Armstrong and his Vscek colleagues from Tokyo to London on 14 August at 7am ET/12pm BST for a subscriber-only webinar discussing the recent financial crisis and where markets are headed next. Register here and ask our panel your questions now.

Peter Pomerantsev responds

Ed, you asked the right question: how new is the phenomenon of a mogul owning a media outlet and treating it like a political plaything?

In a way, this is nothing new. Murdoch does it all the time. But if we agree that Musk is a publisher, using his platform as a publisher, then shouldn’t he be held accountable as a publisher? Murdoch’s Fox News had to pay nearly $1 billion in fines for lying about “rigged” voting machines. Obviously social media is different, the owner of the system can’t be held accountable for everything that is said on it, but if the design of the platform is shown to help incite violence, spread lies that lead to financial harm, should they have a duty of care?

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

But to be able to make a judgment on this, we need algorithmic transparency. If this is a public square, We need to understand how it is designed to understand how it directs speech. Does it push some people into a basement, while giving others a lectern and a microphone? We need to be able to see inside the black box of X, and other companies as well.

And here we come to the crux of the matter. Freedom of speech is also the right to receive information. And right now we have no 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 complaints, unable to understand how this environment is shaped and whose interests it serves. This is not freedom. Or rather, it is the freedom of those who control the platform to manipulate the citizen.

Your feedback

And now a word from our Swamp People…

In response to “What Kamala Harris Should Do About Cryptocurrencies:”
“I don’t think any politician should be in favor of it. [or] against cryptocurrencies. Regulators, on the other hand, should regulate purchases [and] cryptocurrency sales like any other security and brokers should follow the same process they follow with any other asset class. Given that regulators have been slow to do so, perhaps policymakers simply need to encourage regulators in this direction?” — Commentator Philip Southwell, Hill Denham Chapel