What, if anything, can democracies do to address the danger posed by online disinformation
Elon Musk
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Edward Luce, 2 HOURS AGO
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It is hard to know where to start with Elon Musk. Long before he bought Twitter and renamed it X, he was spreading incendiary disinformation. This included a bizarre witch hunt against the British diver who helped rescue 12 boys and their soccer coach from a Thai cave. With no basis, Musk accused the man of being a “pedo guy” after he cast doubt on the submersible rescue vessel Musk had delivered. Musk has since deleted that tweet and others like it.
But he keeps adding new posts to his burgeoning library of almost 49,000. 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 2mn 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 195mn 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 1.2bn 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. But this is a newsletter so I will spare Swampian stomachs.
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 X 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. X 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 X that refugees are child killers then gather to burn down refugee hostels — the site becomes all too real. At critical moments, X 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.
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 Hitler, I could think of no one better than you to answer the following questions: Should democracies be concerned about Musk? If so, what can they do?
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Peter Pomerantsev replies
Ed, you ask the right question: how new is the phenomenon of a tycoon who owns a media and treats it like a political plaything?
In a sense it’s not new at all. Murdoch does it all the time. But if we agree that Musk is a publisher, who is using his platform as an editor, then shouldn’t he be liable like a publisher? Murdoch’s Fox News had to pay almost $1bn in fines for the lies about “rigged” election machines. Obviously social media is different, the owner of the system can’t be liable for everything that’s said on it, but if the design of the platform is shown to help incite violence, spread lies that incur financial harms — should he have a duty of care?
The difference between legacy media and digital platforms is that the former created content, which can be regulated. But platforms don’t produce content so much as build machines that target, promote, suppress and distribute content in certain ways. It’s that system — sometimes known by the term algorithm — which is the thing we need to understand.
But for us to make any sort of judgment on that, 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 shove some people into a cellar, while giving others a lectern and a mic? We need to be able to see within the black box of X — and other companies too.
And here we get to the crux of things. Freedom of speech is also the right to receive information. And we currently have no information about how Musk — and others — shape our information environment. We are flooded 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 weird sounds and distorted ranting, unable to comprehend how this environment is shaped and whose interests it serves. That’s not freedom. Or rather — it’s the freedom of those who control the platform to manipulate the citizen.
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And now a word from our Swampians . . .
In response to “What Kamala Harris should do about crypto:”
“I don’t think any politician should be for [or] against crypto. The regulators, on the other hand, should regulate purchases [and] sales of crypto just like any other security and the brokers should follow the same process as they do with every other asset class. Given regulators have been slow to do this, perhaps the politicians need to just encourage the regulators in this direction?” — Commenter Philip Southwell, Chapel Hill Denham
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