“I love Elon Musk,” Donald Trump said last month. “We have to make life good for us smart people. And he’s as smart as you get.”
He took a different view in 2022, when Musk suggested that Trump should “sail into the sunset” and backed Ron DeSantis for the Republican nomination for president. Trump called the X owner a “bullshit artist”. Since then, though, relations have warmed considerably.
While Musk has denied reports that he will give $45m a month to a Trump-supporting Super Pac, he acknowledged launching one of the arms-length political organisations in support of Trump without saying how much he would give. Meanwhile, quite apart from reinstating him to the platform in 2022, he promotes Trump through his personal feed and is thought to have played a key role in persuading the former president that he should pick JD Vance, a darling of rightwing tech entrepreneurs, as his running mate. (How’s that going?)
That is the context for his interview today. “Clearly Musk didn’t create Trump’s resurgence,” Dan Milmo said. “But he’s certainly amplified and reflected it in a way that no other big tech leader would.”
How much influence does he have in the US?
Musk said soon after he bought Twitter that “to deserve public trust,” it must be “politically neutral”. Many are unconvinced that he has stuck to that approach in the US or anywhere else. “He’s weaponised it in two ways,” Dan said. “Through his own presence, and through changes helping prominent far-right accounts via a lax approach to moderation.”
Since taking over, Musk has fired half of X’s election integrity team, disbanded its trust and safety council, and changed the way the “blue tick” system operates to mean that anyone can pay for the promotion it now provides – a tool much more commonly used by those on the right. There is little visibility on whether X’s algorithm has been tweaked to promote right-leaning voices, but many observers say that their own feeds suggest it may have been.
And while he is supposedly driven by an iron commitment to free speech, that has not been consistently applied: the “White Dudes for Harris” account, for example, was recently briefly suspended and then labelled as spam.
Even just by dint of his own 192 million followers (who see a lot of his posts after he reportedly directed engineers to amplify his output), Musk has considerable personal weight on his platform. The Center for Countering Digital Hate produced an analysis last week saying that false or misleading claims he has posted about the US election have been viewed almost 1.2bn times – and appear to be excluded from X’s “community notes” factchecking system.
“All of this has been controversial,” Dan said. “It’s important to understand that X is not a mass media market – but it’s where people go when big news breaks, and it is a place that can trigger a debate among influential people that washes out to everybody else.”
What about the UK?
Musk has shown no sign of deferring to the norms of other countries where his absolutist theory of free speech might find less support than in the US. “He made the decision to reinstate Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate,” Dan pointed out, both figures who were banned in the past.
“You’ve seen the direct effects of that in their influence over the past couple of weeks. And his own interventions since the Southport attack have certainly been the most provocative he’s ever made in the UK. Before Musk arrived, I’m pretty confident that a lot of the most incendiary content would have been taken down. But they don’t do that sort of moderation any more.”
As well as entering a war of words with Keir Starmer and personally promoting accounts that dubiously claim the danger of the rioters has been overstated while Muslim troublemakers go unpunished, he has reportedly ignored requests from the government’s disinformation unit to take down posts that it believes are inciting violence.
He also shared a post from the co-leader of the far-right Britain First party featuring a fake Daily Telegraph story claiming that Keir Starmer is considering building “detainment camps” on the Falkland Islands. That was viewed close to 2m times before it was removed without acknowledgment.
Is he pursuing a similar approach elsewhere?
Musk’s appetite for confrontation with the Labour government is similar to previous confrontations with centre-left administrations around the world – like in Australia, where he successfully challenged a ruling barring a video of a bishop being stabbed in a Sydney church not just within Australia, but around the world, because there was no way to stop Australian users using a VPN to access it. Other major social media firms complied; Australia’s eSafety commissioner said she had been the subject of death threats as a result of the row.
Meanwhile, Musk is battling with the EU, which filed charges against X last month under the digital services act for ignoring European law and allowing disinformation and illegal hate speech on the platform.
At the same time, he has formed friendly relationships with populist rightwing leaders from Italy’s Giorgia Meloni to Argentina’s Javier Milei and former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. The common denominator is that he appears much more minded to give politicians a hearing when they are sympathetic to his underlying worldview.
Can anything be done to curb his behaviour?
If the EU succeeds in its case, it will be able to levy significant fines and enforce changes if X wishes to maintain access to users in Europe. In the UK, meanwhile, there are questions over whether the new Online Safety Act will be sufficient to oblige Musk to make changes. On Friday, Sadiq Khan and Starmer suggested the legislation was not fit for purpose. And last week, technology secretary Peter Kyle told the Times: “The relationship we have with some of these companies is much more akin to the negotiations with fellow secretaries of state in other countries, simply because of the scale and scope that they have.”
British MPs have said they want to call on Musk to appear before the science, innovation and technology committee to be questioned over X’s role in fomenting the recent far-right riots, as well as his own comments. He is highly unlikely to show up for such a session.
On criminal charges for those inciting violence on social media, the Online Safety Act “largely puts existing tools that are available into one place,” Dan said. “It will do its job on that in the way its antecedents are doing their job.”
But on the civil aspects of the bill which could enforce fines on companies like X, the prospects are much less clear, he said. “The bill basically tells social media firms to enforce their terms and conditions properly. Those bits are going to take until beyond the end of the year to be implemented. So we don’t know how effectively it will work.”
Even if hefty fines are the consequence, he added, “Musk’s quite staggering wealth suggests that he can cover any losses for a very long time. And given what we know about how he sees the political and social impact of how he operates, it wouldn’t be surprising if he accepts that cost.”
