When Donald Trump claimed victory in America this week, there was one man who had been beside him during the election campaign who was also enjoying an elevation in power. Not Vice President Elect JD Vance but the world’s richest man and owner of X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk.
Musk and Trump have been playing a long game. And as a society, we should be worried as that game has included dismantling the building blocks vital to democracy in the US, Europe and beyond.
When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 he made headlines by firing staff and ripping apart its functions. But with his billions coming from other businesses such as Tesla and his space race escapades, Musk’s Twitter takeover was considered by many to be a sideline or hobby.
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Now we have a fresh view of the long game. “You are the media now”, Musk tweeted to his 203 million followers on Tuesday night, presumably from the confines of Trump’s Florida residency Mar-a-Lago. The reason this quip stands out is seated far earlier in Twitter and political history.
When Trump was inaugurated for the first time in January 2017, he was prolific on Twitter, using the platform to sidestep the mainstream media and communicate directly with the people.
His chaotic and unconventional use of Twitter and abhorrence of the mainstream media utterly changed the power and scope of social media.
Then, in 2021, Trump was banned from Twitter after the platform deemed two of his posts as glorifying violence following the storming of the Capitol. During the months that followed, Trump’s posturing was almost nowhere to be seen.
Then in late 2022, Musk and Trump separately made headlines again, with Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (at which point he reversed the former president’s Twitter ban) and as Trump began to limber up for his return as the 2024 Republican presidential candidate.
It has now become clear that Musk did not take on Twitter as a plaything. He has used X to create a mainstream media alternative that comes with a powerful partnership.
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AFP via Getty Images)
Alongside tweets supporting Trump and dismissing mainstream media and left-leaning politicians in the US and UK, Musk has regularly changed his profile picture to reflect his American dream, the most recent showing him in a “Make America Great Again” hat. And in August, Musk “interviewed” Trump in a cosy live chat hosted on X.
Off-platform, Musk has attended rallies and reportedly pumped £92m into a Super-PAC (Political Action Committee) supporting the Trump campaign.
All of this matters because this week Trump and Musk took power almost hand-in-hand and part of their playbook is to disavow and discredit the mainstream media and prioritise “free speech” over facts.
Just earlier this week Trump suggested any potential assassin at one of his rallies would have to “shoot through the fake news media” – AKA the journalists covering the event – and he “wouldn’t mind”. The inference that violence against journalists is acceptable is a red flag to our democracy.
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AFP via Getty Images)
For elections to be free and fair there needs to be public access to independent, truthful, verified information and facts about events, the politicians and parties running for office and the way a country is governed. Someone also needs to hold politicians and the powerful (including big tech) to account. This is a crucial role played by a diverse news community with a range of views, angles and agendas, giving the public a broad picture.
Journalists and the media play an important part in this process by covering and producing independent news that must adhere to legal guidelines and ethical codes. The media is a powerful force and if journalists or news organisations make poor decisions, they are rightly held accountable publicly and in the courts.
To dismiss all media as fake is incorrect and grossly unfair. When the most powerful people in our society use their own channels to repeatedly spread mistrust and hatred of the collective media to hundreds of millions of followers, we are in a situation where nobody knows who to trust any more. And the risk is elevated further when those same people spread their own, unverified assertions, a recent example being Musk’s repetition of Trump’s TV debate claim that immigrants were eating family pets in Springfield, Ohio.
In this melting pot of information, the regular user has to wade through the noise to decide what’s right and wrong. For democracy to have a chance, verified and accountable journalism has to have a recognised and valued space within our society. But de-prioritisation of mainstream media on social platforms alongside the degradation of news journalism by those in positions of power, is dangerous. And, when the people running the media organisations are also the ones in a seat of power, we have to question if that state can still be considered democratic.
The next four years will be unpredictable but there has to be some hope; after all, the Online Safety Act in the UK should, in some part, start to compel social media platforms to take more responsibility for harmful online content. Similarly, not all powerful platforms and people want to see the failure of mainstream media or the deconstruction of democracy.
But if I was a betting woman, I would put money on an increasingly violent, disrupted and unsafe period for our society. I anticipate a rise in threats to journalists and the media and increasingly difficult access to cover stories that need to be told. I predict a rise in disinformation and a significant challenge in holding the most powerful to account.
I would suggest there will be an increase in violence on the streets of the US and Europe as disinformation fails to be curbed and trust in news continues to be challenged. I imagine we will see more and more headlines about what happens online and its deadly offline impacts.
Ultimately, Trump and Musk’s dual disruptor routine was an election-winning strategy that may see the start of the real breakdown of democracy as we know it. Now a new game begins and the two men at the top are the ones holding the rule book.