A decade ago, in Tanzania to interview Melinda Gates, I was watching the philanthropist being fêted by African leaders when a chilling thought struck me. What if she and her then-husband didn’t use their stupendous wealth to create malaria vaccines or fund HIV research but instead harnessed their phenomenal, unelected power for evil? Who could stop a billionaire going rogue?
History is full of ultra-rich men manipulating governments and public opinion for profit. Usually this process, as with Facebook’s influence on past American elections, is done covertly then largely denied. Until now, we’ve never watched a plutocrat go full Bond villain, cackling from his lair as he spreads discord and fear, baiting elected politicians who can only fight his global omnipresence with the feeble weaponry of a democratic state.
Elon Musk sits astride Twitter/X as the living embodiment of all that is screwed up and vile about his site. This King of Trolls watched from his redoubt in Boca Chica, Texas, while a community library in Walton was torched, asylum seekers huddled in burning hotels, drunken morons were sucked into violent affray and locked up for years. It’s mere sport to him, spreading discord, racism, mistrust and division in a tinpot country 5,000 miles away.
Twitter was, of course, responsible for disinformation long before
Musk bought it in 2022. Yet previously, such horrors could be attributed to Russian bot farms or extremists of all stripes: they were not broadcast openly by the owner himself, who has abandoned all pretence of compliance or safeguarding to rebrand himself lord of misrule.
“Civil war is inevitable,” he tweeted louchely to his 193 million followers, as a mourning Southport swept debris from its streets — like he couldn’t wait, gleefully imagining the viral clips of hand-to-hand combat in Birmingham or Liverpool, the online traffic. Having restored the far-right agitator
Tommy Robinson’s account, Musk now retweets him and shared a fake story posted by Britain First’s leader that Sir Keir Starmer is building emergency detainment camps on the Falkland Islands.
Poisonous rubbish, which Musk deleted later without apology. He couldn’t demonstrate more clearly that X has no care for truth or the human consequences of lies.
So now the question for users is: why stay? I joined Twitter in 2009 when it seemed a remarkable resource, a platform that opened your mind, connected you to old friends and introduced new ones. It was at once a town square, a zeitgeist monitor, a ticker-tape news feed. For a decade I happily shared my thoughts and work, snippets of my life. It was vicious too and, like many, I learnt that an orchestrated pile-on can ruin an afternoon. Over time, I’ve posted less and less. Why endure the fallout of a joke being wilfully misconstrued? Better to share it with a WhatsApp group of people you trust.
Musk bought Twitter with a promise of free speech and certainly I appreciated feminist accounts no longer being suspended for stating scientific fact. But he also ratcheted up the algorithm so you no longer see tweets from people you follow in the order they are posted. Instead, it notes what you’ve read and feeds you more of the same.
So if, say, you read an article on vaccine side-effects, it rams your feed with anti-vax content. When your prejudices are constantly affirmed, you start to believe nothing else is happening in the world. You grow angrier, less tolerant of opposing views; your heart hardens, your temper quickens, you’re yanked from a public place into a silo of jabbering obsessives, away from rationality, doubt and nuance into frothing, raging extremes.
Get hooked and X, like cocaine, will turn you into the worst possible version of yourself.
Moreover, the riots showed that the connection between X and tragic events isn’t tenuous and deniable. You could observe its influence right there in real time. After the three Southport girls were murdered, the made-up name “Ali Al-Shakati” started to trend, along with a rumour the perpetrator was a Muslim asylum seeker on an MI6 watch list. “If this is true,” tweeted a woman, now arrested, “then all hell is about to break loose.” But none of it was true — and all hell broke loose anyway.
Musk not only normalised disinformation, he incentivised it. Accounts with a commercial focus get paid for clicks even if they tweet lies, making conspiracy theories that sweep the world in minutes cash cows. In the riot aftermath, hoaxes swirled: from the right, that an asylum seeker had a gun; from the left, that a Muslim woman had been doused in acid. It is still unclear who created a list of 100 planned sites of far-right violence — the racists themselves, to spread fear, or the anti-fascists who wanted to generate vast no pasarán solidarity marches. Either way, it terrified ethnic minorities, drained police resources and spread a sense that society was unpicking and nothing or no one could be trusted.
Which is how Musk likes it. Far from dialling down his trolling,
he ramps it up, baiting a Labour government because its online harm bill might mean he has to rehire all the expensive moderators he sacked. But also just because he can. This ill-tempered despot worth $250 billion (£197 billion), who gets his kicks chucking online grenades into democracies, is pulling for his fellow fake-newsman Donald Trump and has already spread a deep-fake video of Kamala Harris and stories that the Democrats are promoting voter fraud. Now, having told his advertisers to “go f*** themselves”, he’s suing them for leaving.
Fewer celebrities are posting on X, preferring the calmer seas of Instagram. And after I’ve written this column and begin my holiday, I will delete this toxic app, which threatens both my inner peace and that of my country. The only way to stop this billionaire gone rogue is if none of us ever log back in.
www.thetimes.com
www.bbc.co.uk
arstechnica.com
