It’s generally considered a bad idea to attack a wasps’ nest with a stick, and the same holds true for saying disobliging things about Elon Musk. His swarm of free-speech-loving insects do their utmost to sting you into pained silence.
Within minutes of writing last week’s column about why it might be time for decent people to think about leaving Twitter/X, the swarm attacked. I was a commie mouthpiece from a country which was “in the pisser.” An anonymous user (they mostly are) told me I was “screaming like a feminist at a free-tampons rally” with a “micro-penis anxiety.” At least that was the translation: it may have been worse in the original Lithuanian.
“How gay,” scribbled someone whose profile showed him puffing on a large cigar (no micro-penis anxiety there!). “So freaking faggoty.“ Another sneered: “This is a scary place for pussies like you.” I was a “shitlib” throwing “bitchtantrums.” Among the other explanations for why I must disapprove of Musk was that I was loser, a Jew, a purveyor of drivel, a Hampstead elitist, a typical leftie and/or subhuman filth.
My favourite was from someone—a big fan of Tommy Robinson, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, to judge by his timeline—who went to the trouble of sending me a private message which advised me: “Get your testosterone checked, it seems low. Not kidding.”
So there we have it: question Musk and his anything-goes approach to speech and it follows that you must be a communist at best, and an effeminate sexual inadequate at worst.
On top of all that, a man who makes his living writing for the Telegraph accused me to wanting to create an alternative “smug lefty utopia,” and I wondered how a Telegraph journalist could so spectacularly have missed the point, along with all the other ranters and (I suppose) bots.
Who on earth would want a smug lefty Utopia? Social media, at its best, is all about being confronted with different points of view—with argument, challenge, coherent debate. My objection with the way Twitter/X is being run—or not run—has nothing to do with politics. It’s about the way the platform is being used to stir up hatred, if not actually violence; and—perhaps even more importantly—to erode any sense that some things may be verifiably true, and others not. That used to matter to Telegraph journalists.
These responses are not, I believe, accidental. You will remember Steve Bannon’s vivid phrase from 2018: “flood the zone with shit.” The writer Sean Illing explained its meaning: if you saturate the media ecosystem with misinformation, you overwhelm the ability of anyone to correct it.
“What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age,” he wrote in Vox. “And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable.”
To understand why this matters, you have to go back to the basics of how anyone in a democratic society knew anything was true—the system of institutions and norms that kept us collectively anchored to some form of reality and allowed us to settle our disagreements civilly.
That system was given a name by the American writer, Jonathan Rauch, and it became the title of his excellent 2021 book, The Constitution of Knowledge.
Rauch lists the four fields whose endeavours enable us—most of us, just—to live in a reality-based community: science and academia; journalism; the law and government. That’s the constitution of knowledge—and it’s one which, for three centuries or more, has served liberal democracies well.
In order to escape from that reality, you begin by attacking scientists, lawyers, journalists and the “swamp”, or “blob”, of government. And then you go further.
Donald Trump, in making 30,000-plus false statements during his presidency, was deliberately creating a firehose of falsehood. He was flooding the zone, or, as Rauch puts it, running “conspiracy bootstrapping”—where you say, “This conspiracy theory might be true,” and then circulate it—and another classic one, attention hijacking.
Follow Musk closely—it’s hard not to—and you’ll see he does the same.
“That’s what [Tump’s] doing by behaving outrageously: making sure we could not think about anything else,” says Rauch. “This is a tactic that Hitler promulgated in Mein Kampf: It doesn’t matter if they ridicule us; all that matters is that they can’t stop thinking about us. I think Trump is the greatest propaganda genius since Goebbels. And he’s better than Putin.”
Musk is, along with Rupert Murdoch, Trump’s greatest enabler—and not only Trump. In his almost fanatical mission for absolute free speech with no limits, the man-child has invited back onto his platform people who he knows to be liars, fantasists, conspiracy-promoters and racists-with-intent.
At the same time, he gutted the teams which, however imperfectly, tried to tackle the worst misinformation and attempted to amplify the best. He is, literally, flooding the zone with shit.
“Think of Twitter as a mini-model of the civil wars and creed conflicts—things like the horrific European wars of religion of the 1500s and 1600s—that humanity basically lived with as its standard operating system until about 1700,” Rauch said, even before Musk had degraded that space.
“Today we tend to assume that if you leave people to their own devices, they’ll have pleasant conversations that will be respectful and truth-seeking. That’s totally wrong… if you take a totally unstructured environment, like Twitter, with no guardrails, people are not going to converse with each other.
“They’re showing off their own tribal loyalties—insulting the other tribe, engaging in one-upmanship, indulging in bias confirmation—gradually descending into tribal warfare.”
Which is how the Musk wasps behaved last week. QED.
It took centuries of conscious work to build the constitution of knowledge to, as Rauch puts it, “save us from ourselves.” Untrammelled social media is doing the opposite and leading to a world in which, as numerous surveys show, we increasingly don’t know who, or what, to believe.
It’s particularly problematic in the UK where our so-called legacy media has the lowest level of trust—a full 15 percentage points behind, say, Germany or Italy, and eight points behind the US. It’s no coincidence that the most trusted media organisation, the BBC, is the one most targeted for venomous abuse. Destroy the BBC and the Murdoch-Musk universe becomes much more powerful.
If Twitter/X is becoming the worst of social media, Rauch contrasts it with Wikipedia, “because it was structured according to the constitution of knowledge. We have free speech but also the discipline of facts. You’re going to need to be right—to show your homework. There’s going to be disagreement, and that, too, will be structured, by Wikipedians who have established track records. Wikipedia has shown that with the right incentives, you can transfer a truth-seeking environment to an online world.”
So, no, I’m not going to get my testosterone checked. I’m not craving a smug lefty Utopia. I just want a space which at least aspires to be anchored in reality. Elon’s zone has been well and truly flooded with shit. It’s time for the lifeboats.
