What, if anything, can democracies do to address the danger posed by online disinformation. 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.
via financial times: Elon Musk and the danger to democracy
By Courtesy Photo – https://www.dvidshub.net/image/7132413/usafa-hosts-elon-musk, Public Domain, Link