In many ways, the fabricated, hysterical furore of Humza Yousaf Vs Elon Musk is the ultimate in summer-silly-season politics stories.
Absurdly plainly, the former First Minister ISN’T going to take any legal action against the billionaire owner of Twitter. He only likes bullying small nurseries, and even then he doesn’t follow through. He didn’t even sue us for calling him racist a few months ago, so there’s zero chance he’s going to square up to the world’s richest man.
It’s not even clear what he’d be suing Musk FOR, or in what jurisdiction. The Sunday Mail’s story last weekend was based on comments not from Yousaf himself, but from his eternally attention-seeking lawyer Aamer Anwar, who refused to specify what his grounds of action would be, instead issuing a series of woolly generic lines about what people other than Musk might do as a result of Musk’s reaction to Yousaf’s abuse.
And it’s perhaps worth noting the order of events, because a reaction is what it was. Yousaf started this fight, by calling Musk “one of the most dangerous men on the planet” who was responsible for “some of the most wicked evil I’ve ever seen” – a remarkably extreme statement to make about someone who invents climate-friendly electric cars and space rockets for a living – and Musk retaliated in kind.
(Maybe Yousaf thought nobody would notice the remarks, as there were so few people in the audience. The above description of “a crowd” is somewhat generous.)
But what’s more interesting is the way that politicians and the mainstream media – the two groups most threatened by Twitter’s (very broadly) uncensored data stream – have united to misrepresent events, and in particular the racist speech by Yousaf to the Scottish Parliament in 2020 that’s at the centre of the spat.
When the two men first locked horns earlier this year, those with axes to grind against Musk tried to just flatly deny that the speech was racist, claiming it had been “taken out of context”. (They made no effort to demonstrate that it had, they just asserted it.)
But that line of attack didn’t work, because it was so obviously untrue, and it was meticulously dismantled by this site back in April. The context of the speech was that “institutional racism” and “structural racism” were the reasons for most senior posts in Scotland being held by white people, when it’s simply the overwhelming statistical likelihood in a country that’s 96% white, and was 98% white just a few years ago.
Yousaf offered not one scrap of evidence that anyone had been racially discriminated against for any top jobs. He himself had risen to the position of Cabinet Secretary at the time, and later became – albeit briefly – First Minister. (Indeed, for a period recently Scotland, the UK and Wales all had brown-skinned leaders, in the respective forms of Yousaf, Rishi Sunak and Vaughan Gething in Wales.)
The speech, as many noted, was akin to a white person somehow becoming leader of Pakistan or India and then standing up in their parliament to angrily fulminate that most of the people running the country were brown-skinned.
So now the establishment is coalescing around a slightly different line: that the clip of Yousaf ranting about “White!” people was in some way “selectively edited”. This, for example, is from last night’s Reporting Scotland:
And here’s Pat Kane in today’s National calling it “poorly edited”:
The implication is that the clip has been maliciously tampered with in some way to alter its intended meaning. But other than being a clip (as opposed to the entire 20-minute speech, which would make for some extremely long news bulletins), it’s completely untouched, and as we’ve already established it’s wholly and properly representative of what Yousaf was saying.
(As Wings readers know, the only people who ACTUALLY edited and misrepresented Yousaf’s speech were the Office of the Official Report of the Scottish Parliament, who literally changed Yousaf’s words to sound less angry in the name of “clarity”.)
The point of the speech was that racism was responsible for some or all of the people listed being in their jobs, and that them all being white was “not good enough”. Yousaf made no allegations that any of them were incompetent or unfit for their positions, his only stated issue was with the colour of their skin.
The BBC website also linked to a “fact check” on the video by Reuters, claiming that it had found people had “misrepresented” Yousaf’s comments.
But the Reuters “fact check” identified the context entirely correctly.
And unfortunately objecting to the colour of people’s skin rather than to anything they’ve actually done is pretty much the definition of racist.
As such, the clip is neither “selectively edited” nor “misrepresents” the whole speech. It’s simply an accurate summary of it.
Supporters of Yousaf, entertainingly, launched into the “but some of his best friends are white, so he can’t be racist!” argument that’s so roundly mocked and jeered by those on the left when those on the right say that Nigel Farage can’t be anti-European because his wife is German or that the Reform Party can’t be racist because they had numerous non-white candidates.
We’re quite sure that Humza Yousaf has plenty of white friends. Just as Farage is married to a German, Yousaf was once married to a white woman. But that isn’t the standard being deployed by those attacking Elon Musk on Yousaf’s behalf. Yousaf’s speech was unquestionably racist, and by these people’s rules that means HE’s racist.
(The sort of people who call a man dangerous, wicked and evil because he doesn’t do enough censorship of views they don’t like aren’t big on nuance.)
But by careful manipulation of language, and by selectively misrepresenting people’s objections to the speech, a range of bad-faith actors with their own reasons to dislike Elon Musk and his more balanced incarnation of Twitter are uniting to try to muzzle it by constantly accusing it of fomenting every possible kind of hatred.
Their answer to this problem, of course, is the same as it always is: censorship, and laws which put control over what people are allowed to read in the hands of – guess who! – themselves and their friends in the legacy media.
In the interests of transparency we must naturally disclose, to anyone who’s not already aware of the fact, that Wings Over Scotland has some skin in this game. Under the old management of Twitter, the SNP had managed to get our account silenced for three years (and continue to try to do so) after we became critical of the party, and it took Musk’s takeover to get our voice restored – a move commended even by people who didn’t like us but understood the value of free expression.
Hatred existed before Elon Musk. Social media is not the cause of it, and suppressing views you don’t like rather than addressing the issues they arise from rarely works out well for humanity.
If you think someone is a far-right bigot (a term which currently encompasses anyone who doesn’t think lesbians have penises or that men shouldn’t punch women in the face in the Olympics), nobody’s forcing you to read their tweets. If their tweets are illegal rather than merely personally offensive to you, you can call the police, because illegal stuff is their job, not Elon Musk’s.
Criminal speech is every bit as unlawful now as it was before Musk bought Twitter. Defamation is just as legally actionable. And opinions you don’t like are just opinions you don’t like. You have the power to censor them for yourselves, with the Mute and Block buttons, or to simply contest them by replying. You are responsible for your own content feed and your own fact-checking. You are not entitled to make those decisions for everyone else.
(This is obviously the main reason the far left is now gunning for Twitter. They loved it when it was a machine for cancelling the people they wanted cancelled, but now they get treated the same as everyone else they’re not so keen.)
The fact that Elon Musk allows something to be said by someone, or even retweets it, does not compel you to believe it.
Because flat-out lying to people in the 21st century is made harder by Twitter, not easier. There are countless accounts you can follow to combat misinformation. (We recommend this one and this one as starting points, but pick your own according to taste.) The Community Notes feature allows for almost instant rebuttal of falsehoods, unlike legacy media where your only recourse is to write to IPSO or Ofcom and hope for a microscopic “correction” at the bottom of page 2 three months later.
Twitter, like every other aspect of humanity, is as good or as bad as humans make it. On Twitter, especially, people have the power, not politicians or media barons. And that’s why the latter two will do everything they can to demonise and censor and control it. Because ultimately they’re not scared of Elon Musk. They’re scared of you.
