One law for the megarich provocateur, another for the poor idiots who follow his lead. The idea of two-tier policing – the false allegation that immigrants are allowed to get away with everything while white “patriots” get punished for expressing their righteous outrage – is one of the memes of the far-right insurrection across these islands. The irony is that it is true in an entirely different sense.
The stupid nobodies will feel the full weight of the law. The most powerful spreader of disinformation, Elon Musk, basks in the reassurance of his own impunity. This two-tier policing fatally undermines the efforts of democracies to defend themselves.
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”.
We’re going to see a lot more of this – including in Ireland. Far-right groups in the Republic are closely intertwined with their mentors in Northern Ireland and Britain. They share an information – or rather a disinformation – space.
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.
Last week, at the height of the far-right violence in England and Northern Ireland, Musk chose to amplify the propaganda of the insurrectionists. He repeated the “two-tier policing” conspiracy meme, calling Keir Starmer “two-tier Kier”. He encouraged his followers to inhale apocalyptic hysteria: “civil war is inevitable”. And he shared what purported to be a news article from the Telegraph (actually created by the fascist Britain First party) claiming that Starmer was considering sending rioters to “emergency detainment camps” in the Falklands.
These interventions were specific and purposeful. Musk was acting as a fascist provocateur. And doing so through a platform (X) he personally controls and on which he has 193 million followers. A platform, moreover, he has deliberately and knowingly opened up to fellow far-right agitators.
Musk has aligned himself quite openly with the English fascist Tommy Robinson, bringing him back on to X last November, responding favourably to one of his posts and publishing on X a “documentary” made by Robinson that has been judged to be in contempt of court. Thanks to Musk, Robinson’s tweets over the weekend when the rioting broke out were (according to analysis by the Tortoise website) read more than 160 million times.
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”.
Musk has inherited his father’s taste for labelling anyone he doesn’t like a paedophile. His attitude to violence perpetrated against elected politicians and their families was revealed when Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked with a hammer by an intruder to the family home. Musk directed his followers to a far-right conspiracy website that suggested (falsely) that Paul Pelosi might have been injured “in a dispute with a male prostitute”. Musk winked: “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye”.
Last week’s interventions show that Musk has now become completely disinhibited. He is fully committed to the far-right creed that civil wars between patriots and globalists have already begun. As he put it in one of his tweets about the riots in England, “if incompatible cultures are brought together without assimilation, conflict is inevitable”. Attacks on Muslim shopkeepers are, in other words, the fault of the Muslims for not becoming white and Christian.
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.