Elon Musk’s beef with Britain isn’t (only) about politics. It’s about tech regulation

 

Elon Musk’s beef with Britain isn’t (only) about politics. It’s about tech regulation

 

Experts suspect X owner’s interest in UK is to put pressure on authorities working to codify a new online safety law

 

Julian Borger

Sat 25 Jan 2025 13.00 CET

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/25/elon-musk-uk-politics-tech-online-safety-act

 

For those wondering why Elon Musk, the tycoon newly infamous for his stiff-arm salutes, developed a sudden ferocious interest in the UK this month, the answer may lie in an arcane piece of online media legislation working its way gradually towards fruition.

 

In a ferocious flurry of tweets of his X platform this month, days before formally joining the Trump administration, the world’s richest man portrayed Britain as a dystopian “police state” run by a “tyrannical government” in which young working-class women are routinely kidnapped off the streets by gangs of immigrants.

 

He went further, singling out the prime minister and Labour party leader, Keir Starmer, for being “deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes” and he described a cabinet member, Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding (protecting young girls from harm, for example), as a “rape genocide apologist”.

 

A Financial Times analysis of Musk’s tweets in the first week in January found that 225 out of Musk’s 616 tweets and retweets in that period were about UK politics. The barrage does not seem to have been provoked by any new political event. Much of his focus appears to have been on rape cases in northern England involving men of Pakistani descent which are more than a decade old.

 

Musk has explained his interest by pointing to his British-born grandmother Cora Amelia Robinson, to whom he was close to as a child. He said his “nana” was “one of the poor working-class girls with no one to protect her who might have been abducted in present day Britain”.

 

Gawain Towler, a former head of communications and strategist for the hard-right Reform party (which Musk has enthusiastically backed against the duopoly of Labour and the Conservatives) argues the mogul does feel a genuine attachment to Britain. He pointed out that Musk’s second wife, Talulah Riley, is British, and some of his children are Anglo-American.

 

“Musk looks at the UK as a sort of distant homeland,” Towler said. “I think he sees Britain as Athens to America’s Rome, and he worries about it.”

 

He argued that the timing of Musk’s dramatic intervention in British politics was a matter of coincidence – he happened to see transcripts of the trials involving northern English “grooming gangs” that abused hundreds of young girls over decades, enabled by the disastrous inaction of the police and judicial system.

 

Keir Starmer was director of public prosecutions from 2008 to 2013. His office failed to act early in his tenure over doubts about the credibility of a central witness and victim, but he acted decisively in the second half of his term, securing key convictions and breaking up the gangs.

 

Political and media analysts argue the timing of Musk’s political assault has little to do with chance but is intended to put pressure on UK authorities as they work to codify the Online Safety Act (OSA), an effort to regulate online platforms. The OSA became law in 2023 but is yet to be implemented in practice. How that is done is due to be decided by the spring.

 

This is all flim-flam to disguise what he is really up to, and his agenda is purely economic in nature

Imran Ahmed, Center for Countering Digital Hate

 

Imran Ahmed, a former Labour party adviser who now lives in Washington, where he runs the Center for Countering Digital Hate, has extensive experience of being at the receiving end of Musk’s displeasure for advocating regulation of X’s content. He argues that the furore about northern English “grooming gangs” is a diversion from Musk’s true aims: to fend off tough regulation.

 

 

“The media and political classes in general are being distracted by his sleight of hand,” Ahmed said. “This is all flim-flam to disguise what he is really up to, and his agenda is purely economic in nature.”

 

Andrew Chadwick, professor of political communication at the UK’s Loughborough University, said that Musk’s focus on fending off regulation has both economic and political motives.

 

“The regulatory context threatens Musk’s idea of influence and how he operates in the world and commands a global agenda, which aligns with the Trump administration, and therefore any, any threat to that which kind of reduces his legitimacy as a political actor, is a problem for him,” Chadwick said.

 

The OSA is meant to put the onus on the big social media platforms to prevent children from seeing potentially harmful content, such as pornography and material that promotes self-harm, suicide and eating disorders. That will require age verification systems. Adult viewers must be given the means to opt out of such content, and the law will require the companies to ensure their platforms do not host illegal material, with the use of codes of conduct, consistently enforced.

 

The OSA was considerably watered down by the Conservative government before it was passed two years ago, and in its current form will do little to stop the spread of disinformation by social media sites like X, which fuelled rightwing anti-immigrant riots in Britain last summer.

 

“The irony with the Online Safety Act is is that it has almost nothing that it can do to deal with the issues that emanate from both Musk and X more broadly. It had many of its teeth removed,” said Joe Mulhall, director of research of Hope Not Hate, an anti-fascist advocacy organisation. But he added that the punitive elements of the law addressing non-removal of illegal content could have repercussions for X.

 

Much will depend on how the regulator Ofcom enforces the law, and there are fears among civil society groups that the Starmer government will pull its punches out of fear of angering the Trump administration. During the campaign, the vice-president, JD Vance, warned that continued US participation in Nato could depend on whether its European allies sought to regulate X.

 

There was further alarm when the UK technology secretary, Peter Kyle, said in November the UK should show “a sense of humility” towards the tech giants, applying statecraft usually reserved for sovereign nations. Earlier this month, Kyle expressed regret that the previous Conservative government, which passed the OSA, had watered it down by removing more severe restrictions on legal but harmful content for adults. But he insisted the act had some “very good powers” which he would use “assertively”.

 

Companies that did not comply with the law would face “very strident” sanctions, he said.

 

In Brazil, Musk bowed to government pressure and agreed to block X accounts accused of spreading misinformation, as well as pay a $5m fine. Chadwick said the effective implementation of the OSA could give further impetus to governments around the world as they attempt to push back against Musk’s influence.

 

The EU has parallel legislation, the Digital Services Act, which the European Commission has been slow to enforce. There has been an investigation into potential violations by X since December 2023, which appeared to be moving glacially until last Friday when the commission gave X an ultimatum of 15 February to hand over internal documentation on its “recommender systems” (how some posts get promoted more than others) and any “recent changes” made to those systems.

 

The European Commission also issued a “retention order” requiring X to “preserve internal documents and information regarding future changes to the design and functioning of its recommender algorithms” in the coming year. X was also asked to hand over interface programmes that would allow the platform to be monitor for its content moderation and “virality of accounts”.

 

Chadwick said the European ultimatum suggested the European Commission was serious about taking on X, and was “potentially a big development”. If the UK opts to implement the OSA in an assertive way it could add to global momentum to regulate the output of X and other social media platforms.

 

“Britain is starting to sort of develop regulations that impact the interests of these people and it provides a model which other countries could follow,” he said.

 

Musk arguably did not buy Twitter to make money, but it could still cost him a lot more cash than he bargained for. The DSA allows fines of up to 6% of global annual turnover for digital companies which break the rules. The OSA envisages fines of 10% of a company’s global trade, and prison sentences for senior executives.

 

“I think Musk may have overreached,” Chadwick said, referring to the recent ferocious personal attacks on Starmer and others. “I think he has made it potentially easier for the UK government, via Ofcom as it develops these new codes, to implement the Online Safety Act. It’s taken ages so far and they have a bit further to go, but my sense is that something has shifted in the past few days.”

 

However, in Musk the UK and Europe would be taking on a behemoth who has now combined his hundreds of billions of dollars with the state machinery of the most powerful country in the world. His clout is far greater than media tycoons from an earlier age, like Rupert Murdoch.

 

“I think he is really feeling his power right now,” said Jen Golbeck, a computer scientist and professor in the University of Maryland’s college of information.

 

“All this concentration of money and power has combined with an attitude common among a lot of tech CEOs and Silicon Valley types – that they are exceptional and should be able to do what they want, free of the confines that govern the rest of the country,” Golbeck said.

 

“Elon certainly has this worldview, and now the feeling of entitlement to do whatever he wants, unhindered, combines with having the money and political clout to get his way. So Europe and the UK pose threats to him doing whatever he wants, and it’s a new place to flex his power. I think that is enough for him to feel like he really can step into anything.”