‘When Musk amplifies disinformation it leads to offline violence in many cases’ – disinformation expert

Nina Jankowicz was the Executive Director of the Disinformation Governance Board of the United States – and is now Co-founder and CEO of the American Sunlight Project, an organisation tackling disinformation.

Matt Frei: Elon Musk, while creating all this trouble on this side of the pond, would say, ‘I’m exercising my First Amendment rights of free speech. And what’s the difference between me expressing my far right opinions, you might call them moderate, on X, compared to Fox News, for instance, doing the same thing on TV?’

Nina Jankowicz: I think Musk is right about that. There’s actually not much difference, except his megaphone is much, much larger and travels much farther than some Fox programmes. And also he’s not subject, it seems, to the same rules that normal X users are subject to. A couple of weeks ago, before all of the horrible events in Southport, we saw him sharing a deepfake video that claimed to be Kamala Harris’s new campaign ad, but it was actually deepfaked audio that he shared without any sort of notification to users about that. That actually goes against the platform’s terms of service in two ways. But apparently when you’re the owner of the platform, you can do what you want, which is extremely troubling. And we know that when he amplifies claims of disinformation, when he amplifies false rumours and things like this, that actually leads to offline violence in many cases. So we do need some regulatory mechanism that can push back on his claims and keep him and his platform in line.

Matt Frei: Is the really big difference here the size of his megaphone? The fact that he’s got, what is it, 145 million followers, and X reaches millions upon millions of people around the planet.

Nina Jankowicz: I think it’s 194 million followers now and growing by the day. But also he’s empowered this extremely radicalised group of people on the platform, I would say. It’s not just the likes of Alex Jones and others that he’s reinstated to the platform, but the platform has materially changed since he took ownership of it. As someone who has received her fair share of online abuse and harassment myself, those things aren’t getting actioned as much, and people who follow Musk feel empowered to harass, to threaten, because they know there’s not going to be a consequence for them. So while Elon Musk might be able to share a silly meme and make a joke, that empowers the people who follow, who are his acolytes to do much worse, and then there’s no consequence for that. That’s where we get into this accelerationist situation that’s really, really troubling.

Matt Frei: He wasn’t mincing his words today or his tweets today, he was telling the EU to basically f*** off. What can anyone, whether it’s the EU, or the US government should they want to, or the UK government, do about Musk?

Nina Jankowicz: I wouldn’t hold your breath for the U. government doing anything, certainly not in the next couple of months. We don’t even have basic deepfake regulations on the books right now, which is kind of scary given the election that we’re about to head into. I think the Online Safety Act in the United Kingdom is a good start. I think it needs to be constantly revamped and improved to reflect the new advances in technology that we’re seeing and the ways that these platform owners are acting. In Australia, they’ve got an E-Safety Commission that has actually gone head to head with Musk several times, and they are able to impose fines on owners of platforms, much like the Online Safety Act does, in order to get them to fall in line. Now, I would encourage governments to make those fines enough that they actually matter to these multi-billion dollar corporations.

Matt Frei: But can you envisage a world in which America does nothing about Musk, either because Trump is president or because of the power of First Amendment free speech rights, and then suddenly the UK, fearing what he might do online, will say ‘We’re going to have to ban people from using X in this country’, the way that they do in Iran, you know, or in North Korea?

Nina Jankowicz: Certainly that’s not something that I would condone, and we have seen other governments flirting with that idea. Russia, namely, has talked about banning platforms. I think any democratic government would be very unwise to consider something like that. But with the Online Safety Act, with the Digital Safety Act in the EU, we’ve got a number of regulations on the table, I think, that can patch together to make a regulatory framework that will work in lieu of the United States doing something. But I absolutely agree with the premise of the question, which is that the United States not acting to aim for transparency and oversight of these platforms that are headquartered in our country, is a total dereliction of duty, and we need to step up and I hope to see the next congress do that.

Matt Frei: And very briefly, do you think it’s possible that we might see people just getting off X, as some Labour MPs in this country have suggested, just boycotting it?

Nina Jankowicz: I think we’ve seen a pretty big exodus of American users and then of many UK journalists over the past several weeks since the incident in Southport, and I think that is understandable. We’re seeing them migrate to other platforms like Threads, and it’ll be interesting to see if that holds over the next several weeks.