Elon Musk and the new world order: the hijacking of the global conversation

Elon Musk , a South African-Canadian-American billionaire, uses his social media platform X.

Last week he called the safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips , a “rape genocide apologist” and accused the prime minister, Keir Starmer , of being “complicit in the rape of Britain ” He seems to be on a campaign to trigger new elections and get rid of the PM.

For Mark Zuckerberg , how we see the world seems largely to be driven by short-term profit.

With Musk , as my Johns Hopkins University colleague Henry Farrell writes, it seems more to do with his personal kinks.

The public sphere’ was always a messy, semi-mythical idea, but even as an aspiration it now seems distant.

There is a growing transparency divide between Europe and the US but it is America that has less freedom of speech in this sense.

That gives citizens less choice and agency to understand what they see and how all is controlled by tech CEOs.

Regulating single pieces of speech online is hopeless and often wrong.

But regulation can only do so much when it comes to speech.

We need to support the creation of other platforms that are designed not to amplify lies and hate, but to promote a better conversation.