One law for megarich provocateur Elon Musk, another for the poor idiots who follow
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Last week in England, a 55-year-old woman was arrested over an online post inaccurately “identifying” the suspect accused of killing three young girls. Chief supt Alison Ross said this was “a stark reminder of the dangers of posting information on social media platforms without checking the accuracy”. She added that “we are all accountable for our actions, whether that be online or in person”.
On Friday, two young men were jailed – one for 20 months, the other for more than three years – for provocative posts. One of them was so thick he posted under his own name while boasting that he had “watched enough CSI programmes” to ensure he would “categorically not be arrested”.
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We’re going to see a lot more of this – including in Ireland [...] Responses to online provocations will therefore have to be aligned too. There will be more prosecutions of individuals who share fake stories that feed into violent attacks on immigrants, religious minorities and asylum seekers.
But the eejits who get caught are low-hanging fruit. Typically, they’ve been hooked by the algorithms engineered by the social media companies to mimic addictive drugs. Their brains have been rewired by constant exposure to conspiracy theories and hate content.
Thus, the war on disinformation begins to look very like the war on drugs. One of the great social disasters of the contemporary world was the policy of arresting and imprisoning drug users. It caused immense harm to individuals, families and communities while doing nothing to stop ruthless suppliers from creating an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
The Pablo Escobar of toxic disinformation is Elon Musk. His lying is a fully integrated business. He simultaneously produces, consumes and distributes disinformation.
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Musk isn’t doing this only because incendiary content has become a big driver of X’s business model. He is sincerely committed to far-right provocation.
As time has gone on, Musk has become more and more like his father, a full-on, down-the-rabbit hole conspiracy theorist. In his biography of Musk, Walter Issacson quotes one of the father’s emails to his son suggesting that in Musk’s native South Africa “with no Whites here, the Blacks will go back to the trees” and calling Joe Biden a “freak, criminal, paedophile president”.
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What are democracies going to do about this? The only political entity that has shown any real appetite for taking Musk on is the EU Commission, which last month made a preliminary finding that X is in breach of the Digital Services Act because its “verified accounts” are deceptive, its promotion of advertising is not transparent and it refuses to provide real-time data to allow action against disinformation.
This is welcome, but even if X is eventually found guilty, it will face financial penalties, not criminal sanctions. Musk, as we know, is quite happy to lose money in the promotion of far-right causes.
What has to happen is that Musk is held personally to the same standards of criminal justice as random idiots who join his chorus. He is, he says, against two-tier policing. Take him at his word.