I’m talking about Elon Musk, maybe he’ll sue me over this piece, though that would be pointless as I have nothing. He is correct in what he is doing however, letting his X platform host whatever from whomever.
Before you react, let’s examine why I think this…
I’m not a journalist, but I write. I’m a blogger and I am alone in my researching of various topics and speaking about them. Now I think I am pretty fair at this, but I may be quite wrong about that. The point to bear in mind is that I am NOT a professional, nobody pays me to do this, you as the reader are under no obligation to think that I have any expertise, you do not have to think that the things I say are the truth (though I always try to make them so), and you may question how I arrive at what I think (in fact I encourage that last one). Not being a proper journalist (a lot of journalists are not proper) I am not compelled to have multiple sources for the things I may state, and not having a team of researchers I do not have all the facts all the time, so what I do is offer a perspective.
Caveat over, let us proceed…
Musk opens the platform, unbans the radicals, and argues that it’s Freedom of Speech, and he is right. When you own the platform, but recognise that nobody can legitimately decide who can speak and what they can say, then you are performing an act of power seeding. That is what Musk has done, he has given up the power he has purchased and is allowing others to have it. Now his reasons may not be so noble as some might like to suggest, but this is a very smart marketeer we are talking of here. The man plays with the platform, using tweets that are designed to elicit anger, frustration, worry and fear, he engages with millions of persons and influences them. What I think he is up to, in simple terms, is making impressionable weak-minded people do as he, and his class, want/need them to. That is to engage, believe and then act. In this way he is power leeching, drawing his power from those followers. So to get all the power he gives some of the power, and to get the people engaged he allows the most engaging people, very smart.
Musk knows that anger is the emotion most likely to make a person, or a body of people, act. The mob is anger, the riot is dissatisfaction, as long as the platform they use is X then his advertisers and influencers reach more people, and he is a greater success. That is the point of such things, and if you let it drive you then it will drive you, it’s your fault if you act as has been suggested. I could watch Andrew Tate all day long and although he may draw upon some truths I would not support his conclusions because I have my own mind. The same applies to Jordan Peterson, and to Tommy Robinson. So I don’t need the censors, I don’t need an authority to read a book and decide that I couldn’t.
The onus to sort truth from nonsense is on the receiver of the info, but as a society we must ensure that certain things the public know are not falsehoods. So what we do is regulate the industries that provide information and wish to call it news in an official sense. This is different to social media, those platforms are not regulated in the same way, so nothing on them needs necessarily to be a truth, anyone can make a completely untrue claim and there is only consequences in litigation from the person the claim pertains to if they have the opportunity or the means to do so, not from the platform. The ex president of the US, a man well known for making untrue statements (or what his former press secretary described as “alternative facts”), uses social media all the time, he uses it to fire up the emotions of his followers and to capture the unhappy people who feel that nobody represents them. He doesn’t represent them or their best interests, but they haven’t figured that out yet.
I said the onus is on the reader/viewer, and here lies the problem, this is far too much responsibility for some folks to handle. You have to use a methodology to decide what is true and what is not, and some folks are a bit too thick to do that, others just too tired from he working day to disbelieve what their favourite charismatic social speaker says. What happens is that something that has no evidence behind it, a statement, can lead to action on the part of a body of people, that does not represent reasonableness. We have seen this recently with the riots against muslims happening all over Britain in 2024 based on misinformation that was repeated, and even when the truth was revealed, it still did not prevent those that had initially believed the falsehood from continuing to act as if it were a truth.
I think this is very much a human thing, it is hard to put anger away, or refocus it somewhere else, again Musk knows this (at least his people do). What is needed is the ability to discern what is likely to be a truth from what is likely to not be, and here we also find a problem, what is suggested in possibility becomes a truth in the mind, the conspiracy. People extrapolate meanings from things suggested, they fill in the blanks that have been left blank deliberately. The suggester knows this, they know they can skirt around a conclusion, never quite stating it, and the masses will get there on their own, leaving the possibility of ambiguity as a defence against accusation.
We need to be suspicious yes, but stronger in in our scrutiny of our own thinking. The blanks are being used to drive us…
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