In the past few weeks, Elon Musk has posted thousands of times on his social media platform X about British politics, the far-right activist Tommy Robinson and conspiracy theories over a decades-old sex abuse scandal.
Now, the British government’s agenda has stalled as the prime minister faces questions about the theories Musk has elevated.
It’s a stark example of how the world’s richest man can influence politics in any country, and comes at a time when competitors like Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg are trying to copy Musk’s playbook.
Today, contributor to The Saturday Paper, Elle Hardy, on how Musk and Zuckerberg are reshaping the internet and democracy.
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Guest: Contributor to The Saturday Paper Elle Hardy
From Schwartz Media.
I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. Elon Musk's new obsession began on New Year's Eve, and in the weeks that followed he fired off thousands of posts on his social media platform X about British politics, decades old sex abuse scandal, and a man named Tommy Robinson. Now the British government's agenda has stalled as the Prime Minister faces questions about the conspiracy theories Musk is pushing. It's a stark example of how the world's richest man can influence politics in any country, and comes at a time when competitors like Mark Zuckerberg are trying to copy Musk's playbook. Today contributor to The Saturday Paper el Hardy on how Musk and Zuckerberg are reshaping the Internet and democracy. It's Tuesday, January fourteen, So elle on ex Elon Musk is posting a lot about a man called Tommy Robinson. So to begin with, what can you tell me about Tommy Robinson?
Tommy and Robinson's a pretty unpleasant dude. He's actually in prison at the moment for eighteen months on contempt of court charge. He came to prominence in Britain in two thousand and nine.
Robinson first became known more than a decade ago by leading chaotic rallies with the self styled English Defense Lead.
Their animating issue was being anti Muslim and anti immigration any man in this punt. He had quite a strong following in the UK and he was a very prominent figure, but his influence did start to wane as he was slowly deplatformed from things like face Book and Twitter back in the day, until Elon Musk reinstated his ex account in November twenty twenty three as part of his commitment to freedom of speech in letting people back onto the platform that had previously been banned.
Okay, and so tell me what Elon Musk has been posting it about him.
Musk seems to have become kind of obsessed with Tommy Robinson ever since New Year's Eve.
Now the Labor Party has caused an international ferrari a huge backlash at the Charlie Peters from gb News revealed it will block a full inquiry into the Oldham rape gang scandal.
O News Eve, a report from the right wing British news channel gb News came to Elon Musk's attention about some historical allegations of child grooming gangs in the UK. It was a really big problem in the two thousands of twenty tens and there've been a number of large national inquiries into the problem. But gb News sort of beat up a story out of nothing, saying that a particular small town in the north of England was calling for a fresh inquiry into further allegations about child grooming gangs and the UK government were going to launch a new inquiry even though they just had one in twenty twenty two.
This comes as the ki Stormers attacked over his handling of the Oldham grooming gang scandal when he was head of the Crown Prosecution Service.
With later but this really became a story about the perception that the Labor government is scared of taking action on issues such as pedophilia, on issues to do with potential crimes by immigrants in the country. And Elon Musk became interested in Tobby Robertson's case as it was connected to the grooming gang scandal very loosely in that Robinson was someone who was always talking about this in the media.
There's a total duty of police and operation in this app where they get away of what they want, the exac community get away of what they want. The police do not know how to deal with these problems. I went on saying that they use drugs as a weapon against our community to get our children into Peter Felix practices, which is what was now known as grooming.
So Elon became interested in Robinson's case and has started posting things like free Tommy Robinson now. And he's been falsely implying that his imprisonment has something to do with exposing the grooming gang's scandal in the UK, which Robinson didn't and which his imprisonment has nothing to do with. And Elon Musk has sort of worked himself into a frenzy. The Financial Times counted as of last Thursday, I believe that he had tweeted more than eleven hundred and eighty times about British politics in one week.
So by talking about this grooming scandal and stoking the kind of the associated racial tensions that come with it, what effect is that having on UK politics and on the current Prime Minister?
Kiirstarma kis Starma was the Director of Public Prosecutions when some of these grooming events came to light. In fact, he did decline to prosecute one case where he said that the victim was essentially an unreliable witness. So a lot of Starmer's political opponents are trying to tie him to the issue, and Musk has been consistently attacking Prime Minister Starma on x At one point he said that Sarma was deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes. And he's also advocated that Starma should go to prison, and he even suggested that America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government. You know, they're derailing the government agenda. I suppose, he'd say, because.
Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible are not interested in victims, interested in themselves. Those were cheerleading Tommy Robinson, interested in justice.
The Labor government last week was trying to push through a bill to begin debating pushing through some of the recommendations from the most recent inquiry that came down in twenty twenty two. The opposition party, the Tories, tried to attach an amendment saying that they needed a new child abuse inquiry because of the fervor that Musk had stoked on X But.
The Conservative leadership under reform MPs marching to the beat of Elon Musk's drum, are plainly weaponizing the pain and the trauma of victims for their own political aids.
And the labor government is now saying, well, hang on, this is going to slow down US passing reforms for child protection. So it really is derailing the whole process, and it's controlling the British political narrative. And once again, this is really all come from one guy with a social media platform who's sitting in the United States.
Why do you think it is? If you wouldn't mind I suppose spelling out how you see this that Elon Musk is talking about this particular scandal. Now, obviously it happened a long time ago, so what is he trying to do here?
Well, this really fits in the context of Elon Musk's recent political far right turn, I suppose he'd say, And he appears to have enjoyed I think the success that he found in delving into US politics, into becoming a major funder for Donald Trump and to you probably helping him get elected, and to providing a voice to that side of politics on his ex platform, and we're starting to see him get more involved in politics in all sorts of different countries around the world, particularly in England and in Germany. And he's not just supporting traditional conservative or right of center parties. He's supporting the furthest right parties. So in the UK he's become particularly interested in Reform UK, which is Nigel Farag's new political party. Frage used to run the UK Independence Party, now that's Reform. Musk had already mooted potentially making a large donation to the Reform Party, but since Nigel Farrage came out and said that there was no room for Tobby Robertson in his party and it's something he stood by for a long time, Elon Musk then started tweeting that Nigel Farrag is not up to the job of leading the party and suggested a possible alternative leader. And given that he's already suggested that he would like to make a large donation to the party and is really pushing their popularity and aims on his platform, this could be quite a seismic intervention in British politics.
After the break the other tech Billie there watching and learning from Elon musk Elle. While Elon Musk has been doing this stoking this anti immigration sentiment in the UK, Mark Zuckerberg has also announced some big changes to the way that he's going to be running Meta, So can you tell me about what he said?
So last week Zuckerberg made an announcement that offered up a series of reforms to Meta, which is much more in line with what Musk has been doing at X.
Here, everyone, I want to talk about something important today because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram.
So they're getting rid of fact checking, which Meta brought in in late twenty sixteen in direct response to allegations about Facebook's role of disseminating misinformation that helped Trump get elected.
Truth.
But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased, have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US.
They're switching to community notes, which is something that must introduce to the X platform, which is essentially crowdsourced fact checking of posts to say if they're wrong and why they're wrong, and linked to more relevant information. They're also not going to be policing comments, particularly about gender and immigration, which are two very big right wing issues.
What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experience.
They've also appointed Dana White, who runs UFC, who's a close personal friend of Trump, and they're moving their moderation teams from California to Texas purely for the perception that people in California tend to me will liberal and that Texas is becoming sort of a new home of big tech.
Okay, and it's hard to see all of this as anything else than a way for Zuckerberg to attempt to get close to Trump, and in his good books, very much.
So, and I mean Zuckerberg has very clearly seen Musk's success in getting close to the incoming administration and obviously what it can do for his companies as well. He has been embracing issues that Trump and Musk both speak a lot about, such as, you know, liberal censorship, importance of freedom of speech, you know, going back to prioritizing that freedom of speech.
And he's been doing.
It in outlets such as Joe Rogan, which is very clearly speaking to that audience of Trump World, of Musk World, and of the wider tech industry itself.
These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and like scream at them and curse, and it's like, these documents are it's all kind of out there.
Did you record any of those phone calls?
I don't know.
I don't think. I don't think we were, but I think listen, I mean, there are emails, the emails are published, it's all it's all kind of out there, and they're like and basically, it just got to this point where we were like, no, we're not gonna We're not gonna take down things that are true. That's ridiculous.
And is this about currying favor with Trump or are there other reasons that that he would be seeking to be in an alignment with the Trump administration going forward.
Meta has an anti trust case coming up that's going to be heard in April. It's a case from a photo sharing app that said it was crushed by the Meta Empire, and antitrust is a pretty big deal in the US. It's the kind of things that you know, they can potentially levy monstrous finds, but they can also break up companies. So tech companies are obviously pretty wary of this and feeling it very acutely. And I mean, it's a pretty good time to get into bed with Trump if he's coming in and he's believing in having a less powerful state. So in general, the tech industry has been very behind the incoming Trump administration and it seems like they're going to be pretty big supporters of him throughout.
So, el we have these two men, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk dramatically reshaping not only the Internet but politics as well. So what do you think the impact of this is going to be on how we experience both these platforms, but also I suppose how we experience democracy in the US and UK.
Certainly, I mean it shows that American politics is for sale. This isn't a particularly new idea, but the fact is that you can buy a tremendous amount of power and influence due to the way that the United States political system operates, and that people are willing to do so and.
Not covert that. They're very happy to do it proudly and loudly. Internationally.
It also shows that these networks can be strong armed. You might have leaders from other countries now who look to get something out of Mask or Zuckerberg or anyone who runs these large platforms. It brings up wider questions of, you know, if governments should be regulating these sorts of social media platforms that have such outsize influence in our lives. I mean, we've just seen this week that Elon Musk's sudden interests in a sort of a fairly dormant British political issue that had been dealt with by an independent inquiry, that he could suddenly change the course of British politics just by tweeting obsessively about one issue.
Elle, thank you so much for your time.
Yeah, no worries.
Also in the news today, the Prime Minister Anthony Alberizi has pledged three billion dollars to upgrade the NBN if his government is re elected. The government says fiber to the node connections would be upgraded, with higher internet speeds to be delivered to around six hundred and twenty two thousand additional premises by twenty thirty and the mass resignation of hundreds of psychiatrists from New South Wales public hospitals will have devastating consequences. According to the federal health Minister Mark Butler. A pay dispute and concerns over the state of the mental healthcare system has prompted more than two hundred psychiatrists to hand in their resignations. The state government has offered a pay increase of ten point five percent over three years, while the psychiatrists, through their union, are pushing for twenty five percent. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.