The way social media is making headlines currently is not without precedent: a fragile narcissist posting relentlessly on a social network he’s made his own. We know well how this has ended in the past; Donald Trump’s furious posts after his election defeat led to the assault on the Capitol on 6 January 2021. The aftermath of that episode saw the then president suspended from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even, to the dismay of those hoping to mood-board the Mar-a-Lago aesthetic, Pinterest.
This time is likely to be different, not least because the person agitating the social media furore, Elon Musk, owns the platform he is using.
On Monday, the two men meet. Musk is having a live conversation with the former president, promising “entertainment guaranteed”.
I worked at Twitter for most of Trump’s presidential term, serving as the most senior executive outside the US. It was clear from my eight years at the platform that there is something lost in translation between British interpretations of free speech and the arguments parroted by those who adopt a US libertarian interpretation of the concept.
Being the British office of a US operation gave us a daily insight into the almost religious rat-a-tat repetition defence of free speech. The founding general counsel of Twitter, Alex Macgillivray, once described the business as being the “free speech wing of the Free Speech party”. In the US, there’s often a myopic sense that its freedoms don’t exist in the rest of the world, but in the UK 1998 Human Rights Act, article 10 enshrines freedom of speech. Critically, there is a recognition that free expression carries with it a duty of responsibility. The UK law requires that such free speech is not used to incite criminality or spread hatred.
For US-based tech firms, the concept of “free speech” is perceived somewhat differently. In my time working under a significantly more enlightened regime at Twitter, it was quickly clear to the team in London that the notion of “free speech” espoused in San Francisco wasn’t always focused on creating the kind of utopian world you might casually imagine. We’d regularly see that there was a dark side to the idea that anyone could say anything; time and time again, it led to a minority group (a subset of straight white males) being able to aggressively target large portions of the rest of society, including women, the LBGTQ+ community and ethnic minorities.
The worst part was that, left unchecked, this group ruined the experience of the platform for everyone else. It’s hard to convince people now who didn’t use the product during happier days, through events such as the London 2012 Olympics or early X Factor, but Twitter used to be joyously good fun to use. A laissez-faire approach to abuse sadly allowed much of the carefree humour to be scared off. As much as X/Twitter loves framing itself as the “global town square”, such common spaces only thrive when everyone knows antisocial behaviour isn’t going to be tolerated.
Working in the UK office was a little like working in a parliamentary system without a written constitution. There was a vague sense that, rather than rules and regulations holding the organisation to account, the platform would be constrained by outside expectations.
For example, during flare-ups in 2013 when prominent female users were being aggressively subjected to rape threats and threats of violence, the only thing that helped the UK office get the attention of our San Francisco HQ was the mention that advertisers were contemplating boycotting the platform. Democracies shouldn’t be left looking at leveraging the soft power of boycotts, not least because in the case of X, most advertisers have long gone.
As someone who worked not only at Twitter but also at YouTube as it came to terms with dealing with its horrible abuse problems, I remain convinced that a social media platform can create behavioural norms that enable polite discussion. Instagram is certainly significantly more civil, and TikTok creators regularly tell their audience that they’ve just served a time-out because the content they posted crossed a line. But to operate a nicer place requires resources – you need to create systems and you need to staff that infrastructure. Whether it was politicians receiving personal threats, footballers having racism spat at them, or users saying they’d been called “a Jewish cunt”, the resources were never given to prove the promise of something better. The government can hold platforms accountable for this – for instance, asking them to confirm the number of UK-based employees in areas like user safety and enforcement.
Despite the attempts to position “free speech” as a philosophical conviction, the reason for its popularity among tech firms is pure and simple – it is cheap. “So it was capitalism after all,” says journalist Kara Swisher, in the first line of her memoir about covering Silicon Valley. The approach taken by tech firms is less about deeply held principles and more about money – as evidenced by the growing support for Trump in the San Francisco venture capital community. We’ve hesitated from labelling tech billionaires as oligarchs because the likes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey wielded their political power gently. Asking oligarchs to be accountable for what their platforms permit is straightforward and entirely possible.
As for Musk’s tweeting, there’s often a tell about his personal posting. The @elonmusksjet Instagram account, which uses public flight logs to track the movements of Musk’s private jets, gives a simple opportunity to match the billionaire’s social media posts with the timezone they were posted from. It was just after 4am in Texas when Musk reshared a fake post suggesting that Keir Starmer was planning to set up “detainment camps” in the Falkland Islands. Glancing at Musk’s X feed shows him regularly staying up long into the night posting and replying. He’s been open about his use of ketamine, apparently a medical prescription. While 4am tweets can be deleted (as the one about detainment camps was), real-world consequences hang around long after the buzz has gone.
What can the UK do right now? Fortunately, it appears the immediate threat of civil disturbance has abated. Musk himself has taken on the aura of a teenager on the bus with no headphones, creating lots of noise but not exactly winning people over. Last week, Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, observed that X had become infuriating to use because the billionaire “has somehow ordered his moronic observations to be inserted at the top of every feed”, something that was confirmed last year by one of X’s engineers when Musk asked them to talk through the construction of the platform’s algorithm. Yes, Musk’s own tweets are prioritised by the app. In addition to freedom of speech, he also demands freedom of reach.
The question we are presented with is whether we’re willing to allow a billionaire oligarch to camp off the UK coastline and take potshots at our society.
The idea that a boycott – whether by high-profile users or advertisers – should be our only sanction is clearly not meaningful. Other countries have banned the app, but we probably don’t want to find ourselves in a WhatsApp group with Russia, Turkey and Venezuela, the other countries on that side of the argument.
In the short term, Musk and fellow executives should be reminded of their criminal liability for their actions under existing laws. Britain’s Online Safety Act 2023 should be beefed up with immediate effect. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his team should reflect if Ofcom – the media regulator that seems to be continuously challenged by the output and behaviour of outfits such as GB News – is fit to deal with the blurringly fast actions of the likes of Musk.
What else should change? Social media should have norms and standards that are publicly accountable. Users should have the right to have their grievances reviewed and acted on by a real person within a week, and escalated to an ombudsman if they don’t like the resolution. Ofcom should have the right to demand certain voices, like Tommy Robinson’s, are deplatformed. Anyone who doubts the practicality of this should take a look at social media in Germany, where platforms are significantly more accountable. In Germany, illegal Nazi content is routinely removed within minutes of it being reported. Liability extends to local leaders and it is incredibly mobilising.
In my experience, that threat of personal sanction is much more effective on executives than the risk of corporate fines. Were Musk to continue stirring up unrest, an arrest warrant for him might produce fireworks from his fingertips, but as an international jet-setter it would have the effect of focusing his mind. It’s also worth remembering that the rules of what is permitted on X are created by one of Musk’s lesser known advisers, a Yorkshire man called Nick Pickles, who leads X’s global affairs team.
Musk’s actions should be a wake-up call for Starmer’s government to quietly legislate to take back control of what we collectively agree is permissible on social media. Musk might force his angry tweets to the top of your timeline, but the will of a democratically elected government should mean more than the fury of a tech oligarch – even him.
Bruce Daisley was vice-president for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Twitter, working there between 2012 and 2020
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