Sarah Ingham is the author of The Military Covenant: its impact on civil-military relations in Britain.
“It’s not Twitter that counts, it’s the people that sent us here.” Boris Johnson’s advice at his final Prime Minister’s Questions in July 2022 appears to be going unheeded by his latest successor. Both X/Twitter and its owner, Elon Musk, suddenly seem to count far too much to the Labour government, the legacy media, and the European Union.
For them, Musk seems to be morphing from the Tesla genius, who single-handedly advanced the Net Zero agenda by enabling electric cars to be coveted by the most committed of petrolheads, to a Dr Evil, bent on global domination via his online platform.
For the rest of us, he is a free speech champion whose tête-à-tête with Donald Trump on Monday was, despite the star power, a bit plodding.
However, hours before the Trump talk Thierry Breton, an EU Commissioner, stepped in – and with all the self-importance of an overpaid bureaucrat who holds power without any electoral accountability. This embodiment of a justification for Brexit warned Musk not to breach the EU’s Digital Services Act.
He was acting, he stated, “in the context of recent events in the United Kingdom” – as if la belle France failed to inspire headlines such as “Paris is Burning” only last month. Morever, the timing of Breton’s letter suggested that he was only too delighted to meddle in the US election.
The responses on X to France’s Commissioner ranged from reminders about the United States’ First Amendment (concerning the protection of free speech) and Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (ditto), as well as Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU (ditto), to “1776 happened 200 years ago” and the pithy “**** off, tyrant.”
Breton is not alone is wanting (metaphorically of course) to shoot the X messenger. Sir Keir Starmer’s patience must have been tried by Musk cementing the “TwoTierKeir” meme into the consciousness of his 194.5 million followers, and posting a cartoon of an electric chair execution he captioned: “In 2030 for making a Facebook comment that the UK government didn’t like.”
Last week, the Financial Times’s Edward Luce posted (on X, ironically) that “Elon Musk’s menace to democracy is intolerable” while Janice Turner described him in The Times as the King of Trolls. She observes, correctly, that “history is full of ultra-rich men manipulating governments and public opinion for profit” – but this surely includes her paper’s globally-influential proprietor. Is Musk a Rupert Murdoch for our digital age?
It is being forgotten that social media platforms played a key role in the pro-democracy Arab Spring in 2010/12. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube helped to topple authoritarian regimes across the Middle East and North Africa; in January 2011, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak shut down internet access for five days in an unsuccessful attempt to quell the uprising.
Now the legacy of the Arab Spring is patchy at best, but no-one in Britain – especially a few weeks after a general election – should say that the citizens involved should not have tried to change the status quo.
Yet the recent riot-related discourse here in Britain suggests that many policymakers would like to “do a Mubarak” and curb social media. Free speech is now back on the news agenda, fuelled not least by the suggestion made by Alastair Campbell (again, on X) that the police should be investigating Douglas Murray, the Spectator columnist and author of The Strange Death of Europe.
Freedom of expression is a keystone of democracy and should be a fundamental principle for all Conservatives.
There are legal constraints on it, as anyone has gone through the slog of lowly grunt work on a local paper can testify. Most trainees will have access to a battered copy of McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists. Now in its 27th edition, it underlines how the law ensures no-one in Britain can be a Musk-style “free speech absolutist”.
Now the Online Safety Act 2023 attempts to regulate the internet and social media. This un-Conservative measure was sold by Sunak Government as making “the UK the safest place in the world to be a child online”; one consequence of the recent disorder is that the Starmer Government is already already reviewing the Act.
Had MPs put away their mobile phones in the Commons’ chamber – which is a workplace – they might have fully engaged with the Act as it went through Parliament. It failed to address whether children should ever be online unsupervised and why their parents or carers are so indifferent to the content the children view. Would the same adults give the children in their care pornography?
Most controversial, and rightly so, are proposals relating to “legal but harmful” content. This definition is not only subjective, but could give ministers the green light to stifle opinion they dislike, perhaps relating to transgenderism or climate change, under the cloak of the catch-all “disinformation” (i.e. views they disagree with).
It could also burden the police with the same muddle as the similarly un-Conservative Non-Crime Hate Incidents, which the Free Speech Union branded “a chilling restriction of our free speech.”
To what end? Long before the advent of social media, there were outbreaks of mob rule. In 2000, a gang of vigilantes attacked the South Wales home of a paediatrician, having confused her profession with “paedophile”. Law cannot erase pig ignorance.
The Prime Minister must be given credit for halting the recent unrest and swiftly restoring order using existing law, especially relating to incitement and violent disorder. Labour must avoid using the riots as a pretext to crack down further on social media: we have enough law.
Starmer should consider also that antagonising Big Tech might be unhelpful to UK plc. The EU Commission and Ursula von der Leyen, its boss, were quick to distance themselves from Breton and his implicit threat to Musk. Perhaps they had read one tweet the rogue Commissioner had inspired: “EU is overstaying its welcome under US military protection. Probably time to end NATO.”
