Elon Musk was the star attraction at last December’s Atreju festival in Rome, an annual gathering organised by the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s political party, Brothers of Italy. The event takes its name from the young hero in a fantasy novel called The Never-ending Story, which is set in the Kingdom of Fantasia and concerns a monster called the Nothing that swallows up great tracts of the fictional realm, intent on making it vanish entirely. Musk took to the fantasist vibes with gusto.
He told the audience the world’s population is going to shrink to “one-10th of its current size” within three generations. (Fact check: it is predicted to grow to 10 billion.) He said the birth rate had declined to “maybe half the replacement rate”. (Fact check: it is higher than the global replacement rate.) He said farming and cows do no great harm to the environment. “Objectively, this is true,” he added for good measure. (Fact check: objectively, this is not true – cows produce about 15 per cent of the planet’s damaging methane gas.)
When the owner of the globe’s most influential source of information shows himself to be utterly unbothered by the facts, the rest of us ought to be very worried. Personally, he has more than 190 million followers on X, the social-media platform he bought a couple of years ago when it was still called Twitter but already quite putrid. He recently posted one of Kamala Harris’s US election campaign videos after it had been manipulated with a fake voiceover declaring: “I was selected because I am the ultimate diversity hire.” It was viewed more than 128 million times and raised accusations that Musk had violated his own company’s guidelines which prohibit X users from sharing “synthetic, manipulated or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm”. How can truth be safe in this man’s hands?
Media ownership matters. Westminster’s communications committee accepted that reality in its report on the future of investigative journalism when it said an owner “can have a significant impact on the journalistic culture of a news organisation”. There is a long history of rich men acquiring newspapers for the purpose of influencing political policies, or gaining prestige and access to power, or enhancing their own profile, or simply for settling old scores with business rivals. Not all would sail through a fit-and-proper-person test. The spectre of Robert Maxwell springs to mind. Having bought Mirror Group Newspapers for £113 million in 1984, the publisher turned out to be a litigious fraudster and a suspected spy who stole his employees’ pensions.
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Owning a media lodestar can be the ultimate ego trip for a public intellectual-pretender. Musk demonstrated that with his vapid travesty of an “interview” with Donald Trump on X. The temptation to try to shape the news can be alluring.
An alarming paragraph in the recently published High Court inspectors’ report on controversial governance at Independent News & Media (INM) outlines what then chief executive Robert Pitt told the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE) in a meeting with it on November 18th, 2016. According to the ODCE note of that encounter, Mr Pitt recounted a discussion at a company meeting about cutting costs. “[It] was suggested that the terms for the editor-in-chief (Stephen Rae) might be renegotiated. However, [chairman Leslie Buckley] expressed concern in case the editor went public with disclosures regarding editorial interference that had taken place in the past.” INM is on the record as stating that there had been no editorial interference in any INM title by Mr O’Brien.
In our age when truth is under relentless attack and disinformation is a weapon aimed at democracy’s heart, ethics matter – from the top down
That meeting occurred before INM was bought by its current owner, Mediahuis, and when Denis O’Brien, a regular libel litigant, was still the company’s biggest shareholder.
The introduction of a fit-and-proper-person test ought to be the first item on the agenda when Simon Harris marshals his Cabinet to crack down on the falsehoods, hatred and incitement being peddled on multibillion-euro internet platforms. The Taoiseach has indicated his willingness to compel proprietors to comply with the same legal requirements as those that govern traditional publishers, a measure that is long overdue. But, while welcome, it is not enough.
Ireland’s financial regulatory regime requires owners, beneficial owners and managers of charitable trusts and financial services companies to satisfy a fit-and-proper-person test. According to the Central Bank, that means individuals must possess such personal qualities as “honesty, integrity and fairness”. In financial sectors that handle Croesus piles of money, the need for the test requires no explanation. What does need explanation is why there is no equivalent requisite standard for ownership of news media. In our age when truth is under relentless attack and disinformation is a weapon aimed at democracy’s heart, ethics matter – from the top down.
Surely, being rich enough to buy a news organisation is not a sufficient criterion for ownership. Facts are too fragile for feckless oversight. Even when a regulatory regime prescribes ownership standards, they are not always observed. An example is the stipulation by the UK’s communications regulator Ofcom that owners must pass muster for honesty and reputation. Yet after its inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World, Westminster’s culture, media and sports committee proclaimed that Rupert Murdoch, whose empire also includes Fox News, was “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company”.
As a major monetary beneficiary of tech multinationals, there is a greater responsibility on Ireland than most other countries to get tough with the cyberspheric wild west. Should the Government settle for a menu of tokenistic remedies or ones doomed never to be implemented, the damage to the country’s reputation would be immense. Besides, at the rate extremism is spreading, any delay in providing effective statutory mudguards for the facts could prove too late.
In addition to a fit-and-proper-person test for ownership, and in addition to classifying social-media companies as publishers with all the commensurate legal obligations, the third urgent measure Harris and his Cabinet need to introduce is a ban on anonymous social media accounts. As Kamala Harris said to Trump: “If you’ve something to say, say it to my face.” A government intent on banning face coverings at public protests surely cannot continue to countenance keyboard warriors hiding their identities behind made-up names.
One of the first lessons journalism students are taught is that objectivity is a myth. The second lesson is that that is no reason to stop striving for it. It’s a dictum Harris and his government should bear in mind when they sit down to address one of the biggest threats to our world – the war on truth.