You may have heard that Elon Musk and the UK are fighting. And both of them are looking ridiculous.
Riots are happening across the UK in response to the stabbing deaths of three children. The background for the riots is that a bunch of shitlord agitators used Telegram to organize further nonsense on other social media channels, leading to riots over misleading claims about who was responsible. Elon Musk, as he’s been known to do, has been a gullible simp for the lies and conspiracy theories that the agitators are pushing out blaming asylum seekers and refugees, and has been not just endorsing the nonsense, but spreading it further.
Most normal people would recognize that this is not great. But there’s a question of what to do about it, and the UK seems to be choosing the worst possible approach: yelling at Elon Musk, which only enables him to pretend he’s a martyr for free speech.
I wrote a piece at the Daily Beast talking about how the UK’s response to Musk is extremely counterproductive. The key point is that the UK’s Secretary for Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle, says they need to treat Elon as if he’s a nation state. But, as I argue in my piece, that makes no sense, in part because nation states and individuals are very different, and because the affordances for dealing with each are totally different. But, also, because it only works to Musk’s advantage here.
The different realities and the different ways that nation states and private entities can and do interact lead to very different affordances and very different outcomes.
Also, most of the interactions over the past decade were along the lines of: “you need to be better about limiting the spread of content designed to incite violence.” Often, these are situations where the companies agree and want to limit the spread of such content for their own reasons, but may just disagree on how to do so.
It’s entirely different when one of the companies is owned and operated by an individual who himself is one of the leading spreaders of that kind of content.
Most companies don’t want to be spreading that kind of information because it’s bad for their own reputation and the willingness of both advertisers and users to continue to use the platform. But, in Elon’s case, there appear to be extraordinarily different incentives at play.
As I note, Elon lives for this kind of thing, and it only fuels him:
Elon relishes fighting with certain governments (so long as they’re not run by his ideological kindred spirits among right-leaning authoritarians). Pushing or threatening Elon over this is likely to just lead him to playing “free speech martyr” as he’s done in the past. And, to some extent, he wouldn’t be wrong.
The key is understanding that the UK isn’t necessarily mad about general disinformation trending on ExTwitter. They’re mad that Elon’s speaking. And, yes, even in the UK with much lower levels of free speech rights, if you’re arguing over the right of one person to say nonsense, it just becomes a fight over free speech. And there are plenty of others saying the same thing. Musk isn’t the only one doing this.
So, I suggest in the article that rather than focus on yelling about Elon, we should do more to better educate people not to fall for the kind of nonsense that Elon falls for. We should focus on enabling there to be more competition and other places for people to speak, so that one person isn’t in control of one of the most popular spots to speak.
In other words, focus on making fewer people care what he has to say, rather than focusing on trying to silence Elon.
And, of course, some of that should be to take a page from the Democratic party of the last few weeks and move away from scolding to mockery. Elon is the richest man in the world, has access to any expert he wants, and can absolutely find out what’s true. Shouldn’t people start calling out how absolutely ridiculous it is that he instead decides to get his information from a rando named CatTurd2?
There’s a lot more in the full article, so go check it out. I fear we’re just going to keep making the same mistake over and over again, which only plays into the framing that we need people like Elon controlling our speech platforms. He’s not a nation state. He’s a very, very wealthy gullible sucker spreading conspiracy theories. Just point out how ridiculous he is and move on.
