Musk would be judge, jury, executioner

Elon Musk has appointed himself judge, jury and executioner of democracy. You can do that, apparently, when you're the richest man in the world.

With less than a month at the helm, Musk has rolled out the red carpet for Donald Trump to return to Twitter, and slammed the door on Alex Jones. With these two pivotal actions on accounts that had earned lifetime bans, the “Chief Twit” has illustrated how the platform's most consequential and carefully weighed decisions now come down to the whims of one man.

Musk paints himself as a free speech absolutist: unless it's illegal, he says, it should be allowed in the digital town square. We've been down this road before; it led straight to the Capitol riots of Jan. 6, 2021.

The amplification of disinformation on social media has had a profound effect on trust in democratic processes, from malicious Russian election interference, to unfounded claims of voter fraud, spearheaded by Trump himself.

Musk announced plans to develop a clear process for reviewing banned accounts, and create a content moderation council with diverse views. Then, true to form, he did exactly as he liked. He reversed bans on a handful of repellent accounts. For the divisive ex-president, he conducted a straw poll; 51.8 per cent of voters on Twitter chose to restore Trump's account.

At the same time, Trump's favourite conspiracist, Alex Jones, remains banned. For years, Jones profited from false claims the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, staged with “crisis actors,” to separate Americans from their guns. The Infowars personality stokes fear and outrage to drive buyers (whom he calls “patriots”) to his website for supplements and doomsday gear.

Some users insisted restoring Jones to Twitter was the true litmus test for free speech, but Musk held his ground.

What rationale exists to uphold Jones's ban but reverse Trump's? The two are similar in reach and bombast; in naked pursuit of their own financial gain; in pathological indifference to the truth. How they diverge is chiefly a matter of scale: how much grift, how much sway.

There's the law, of course. So far, Jones has been ordered to pay nearly US$1.5 billion to bereaved families stalked and harassed by his deluded followers.

While Jones has been found liable for his lies, Trump's reckoning is still pending. Sure, he was impeached — twice — and the January 6 Committee laid out compelling evidence of sedition (which, if you're grading the severity of illegal speech, is pretty much the top of the heap). The Attorney General recently named a special counsel to oversee investigations relating to the former president.

In the space before a verdict, Musk rendered his own judgment, just as Trump declared his candidacy for the 2024 election. By handing Trump the keys to his most powerful falsehood-amplification tool, Musk is tugging at frayed threads that threaten to unravel American democracy.

Ironically, Musk may not care about consistent free speech principles as much being the ultimate arbiter of who can play in his sandbox. Late Sunday, he defended the ban on Jones, invoking the loss of his first child. “I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame,” he tweeted.

It's possible to overstate Musk's sway over democracy. Employees who survived the first Twitter purge are abandoning ship in droves. Cracks are showing in the hull; it's not clear there are any engineers left who know how to fix them. Maybe Musk will right the ship, or maybe the whole messy $44-billion vanity venture will simply run aground.