Why isn’t Elon Musk stopping antisemitism? I think I know why...

The tech titan claims he is a free speech ‘absolutist’ who wants to defeat ‘the woke mind virus’. But that’s not the only reason he’s flirted with extremism on X, writes Sean O’Grady

Musk is now a publisher, one of the biggest in the world, and he’s responsible for what he publishes (AP)

According to Elon Musk, free speech is just “people you don’t like saying things you don’t agree with”.

That would certainly seem applicable to a reply he made to a disturbing post on X, formerly Twitter, the other day, in which he agreed with some extremist sentiments about Jews and immigration. On the strength of that, and other evidence, I don’t much like Musk, and I don’t agree with what he says. As is my right – right?

I have to confess that I’m so inured to the racism and hate on X that I didn’t take much notice of it when I glimpsed it last week. But it was a disgrace. So much so, indeed, that the White House condemned it – Musk is not so rich and powerful to be able to act with impunity. Yet. (And if the sudden exodus of advertisers is anything to go by, he may soon be thinking twice once it hits his pocket.)

I’m also pleased to see that Rishi Sunak, in a praiseworthy act of leadership, has also criticised Musk (albeit obliquely) for crossing a line into racial politics: “I condemn antisemitism in all its forms. It doesn’t matter whether you’re Elon Musk or you’re someone on the street who’s shouting abuse at someone who happens to be walking past... Antisemitism in all its forms is completely and utterly wrong.”

Looks like their bromance is over.

As someone who purports to represent all of multicultural Britain, Sunak is right to condemn Musk’s foolish intervention, just as he was right to sack Suella Braverman for using inflammatory language and fomenting suspicion and Islamophobia.

So, what happened with Musk? Well, last Wednesday, in what looked very much like an expression of one of those convoluted racial conspiracies that thrive on X, Musk offered the comment: “You have said the actual truth.”

In fairness to the poster to whom Musk was expressing such approving sentiments, a blue-ticked anonymous chap named “The Artist Formerly Known as Eric”, we should quote him, the former Eric, in full: “Okay. Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.

“I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest s*** now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realisation that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much. You want truth said to your face, there it is,” the post added.

Eric, in turn, had been involved in an exchange with another X user, Charles Weber, a “Jewish Conservative from S Florida”. Weber had posted a clip of a dad telling his son off for antisemitic posts on social media, with this message: “To the cowards hiding behind the anonymity of the internet and posting ‘Hitler was right’: you got something you want to say? Why don’t you say it to our faces...”

It’s a complicated argument, and not everything here makes obvious sense, so I’ll allow “former Eric” to clarify it in another recent post: “Jewish people should be anti mass immigration like their literal lives depend on it.”

So, because they (this supposed bloc of Jewish people) aren’t sufficiently “anti mass migration”, they are therefore anti-white, indeed guilty of “dialectical hatred against whites”.

There’s a lot of this sort of nonsense on Musk’s platform X, and it’s an idea presumably sparked by the recent Palestine solidarity demonstrations. The principal flaw in the argument is that far from all of those present at the marches were immigrants, and nor did they all support Hamas’s aim of mass-murdering Jews and the destruction of Israel.

Those that did, in some countries at least, could be dealt with under the laws against supporting terrorism, and have been. Jewish people, and other racial and religious communities, are not some homogenous bloc acting in supposed solidarity on a global basis out of racial or religious loyalties.

To suppose so is to merely propagate multiple variants of the traditional antisemitic trope of a global Jewish conspiracy, the one that once absurdly plonked Marx and Trotsky in with the bankers on Wall Street, but which is now resurgent again.

The problem with Musk is that I’m not sure he is bright enough to understand that, and that what he is doing with the social media platform X is both wrong and avoidable. Letting the extremists back on, legitimising the anti-vaxxers, running the moderation function into the ground and substituting regulation with weak “community notes” is not a price we need to pay for free speech.

He’s said he wants to use X/Twitter to defeat “the woke mind virus”, whatever that is. Insofar as that means anything, it means finding a safe space for intolerance and hate. It is not necessary.

Musk is now a publisher, one of the biggest in the world, and he’s responsible for what he publishes. He isn’t obliged, morally or legally, to accommodate anything and everything. He doesn’t have to tolerate race hate, let alone seemingly endorse it. So why do so?

Musk has previously described himself as a “free speech absolutist”, which I suppose he thinks absolves him from taking much responsibility for what gets said on one of the biggest social media platforms on the planet. Fine, in its way – very logically consistent, this “Musk doctrine” – but it doesn’t mean you have to defend the very many haters and baiters that infest it, nor reinstate the accounts of those who were previously ejected for spreading the most vile slurs, misinformation and incitements.

The organisers of the dignified antisemitism march in London on Sunday set a fine example. The organisers of the protest didn’t want Tommy Robinson and his mini mob arriving to try and turn it into an anti-Islam march. So they and the police prevented him from abusing his right to free speech. Yet Musk has happily let this troublemaker back onto X/Twitter.

The point is, you really don’t have to give people such as Robinson a platform. Having an X/Twitter account is not a human right. Let them go elsewhere. It’s better for all of us; and if you don’t, then sooner or later X/Twitter will die, and with it the Musk doctrine and, quite possibly, the business empire. Would we miss it?