Musk's and Zuckerberg's power has to be restricted.
On Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, how they are responsible for the spreading of anti-democratic propaganda and why the EU should defend itself against them.
Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Meta will be ending “third party fact-checking” and will instead be switching to a “Community Notes Model” like X, since Musk has bought the platform. Meta will be starting with the change in the US and I believe that the EU has to defend itself against these proposes and force Social Media companies, like X or Meta, to take action against Fake News.
Since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter and transformed it into X, fake news have increased and already in 2023 the EU Commission released a report indicating that X contains the largest amount of disinformation on its platform from the big social media platforms. Not only does it contain a lot of disinformation but the algorithm seemingly even prefers and pushes disinformation as the Relative Post Engagement (“The ratio of mis/disinformation engagement […] to non-mis/disinformation engagement […].”) shows.
Even Elon Musk himself is a picture proof example on how the algorithm on X and the purposefully tolerating of fake news is radicalising people. He has gone megalomaniac and starts intervening in other national politics, especially of the UK and Germany. Musk started publicly endorsing the AfD - once again reassuring his tendency towards radicalism. He believes that “only the AfD can save Germany” and denies that the AfD is far right. Instead he even says that the AfD’s policies “are identical to those of the US Democratic Party when Obama took office” which, obviously, is far from true. Not only are the economic policies very different (free trade vs. protectionism), but also in terms of foreign policies (e.g. stance towards Russia) the two differ a lot and last but not least: The AfD is racist, while Obama wasn’t. Musk’s support for the AfD and his intervention in the German election campaign goes so far that he will be holding a public discussion with AfD leader Alice Weidel. Ironically shortly after Musk endorsed the AfD, it was an AfD supporter who drove into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, killing six people and injuring many more. Yet Musk spreaded the idea that the Magdeburg Killer (who is originally from Saudi-Arabia) was an Islamic terrorist and only faked his hatred towards Islam. He calls out the “legacy media” as “propaganda”. Musk also retweeted this post right after the attack in Magdeburg which called for eleven deaths even though, weeks after the attack, there are six deaths. Yet he does not delete his retweet or corrects any false information.
Funnily enough, in the already mentioned report by the EU Commission, it is Facebook who ranks second in the Disinformation Discoverability and Ratio of Disinformation Actors. If Meta (including Instagram, which also doesn’t rank well) now decides to follow Musk’s path in the (non-)handling of fake news, this means that two of the largest social media companies, from which many people get their news, actively allow fake news on their platform. This will lead to the radicalisation of many people who will believe anti-democratic propaganda and eventually fall for extremists like the AfD who wants to abolish the Europe that we know. To be honest the step taken by Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t come as a very big surprise as he is just another billionaire who wants to fit in Trump’s ideology. Maybe he hopes for benefits from Donald Trump as the spreading or even just tolerating of anti-democratic fake news obviously benefits Trump. With Trump coming into play we can see the true political power by billionaires and what they will do to curry favor with Trump. Elon Musk owns X, actively spreads Trump propaganda and will officially become a government advisor for Trump. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and rejects journalism which doesn’t fit into his world view, such as the traditional presidential endorsement or lately even a cartoon by a prize-winning cartoonist which mocked Bezos and his relation to Trump. Consequently the cartoonist, Ann Telnaes, left the Newspaper and called the decision by the Newspaper to reject the cartoon as “dangerous for a free press”. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, now joins the club in doing everything to somehow please Donald Trump by removing the third party fact-checking. Just these three billionaires hold way too much power in politics and over media.
Europe has to defend itself against these developments and force social media companies to actively enforce third-party fact checking and remove fake news. The algorithms should be made public to check whether they are modified in a way that actively pushes disinformation. We can’t just adapt to Musk’s and Zuckerberg’s new rules and accept them. They have to adapt to our rules and respect our democracy. I believe that not a single person should ever hold that much power over the media. If these social media companies and their CEOs fail to respect our democracy, I think they should be broken apart.