That's why we have to fight against the Musk and Trump army

It is generally considered a bad idea to attack a wasps' nest with a stick, and the same goes for making unkind comments about Elon Musk. His swarm of permissive insects will do their utmost to sting you and keep you in painful silence.

Just minutes after I wrote my column last week about why it might be time for decent people to consider leaving Twitter/X, the swarm attacked. I was a communist mouthpiece from a country that was “in a tight spot.” One anonymous user (they usually are) told me I was “screaming like a feminist at a rally for free tampons” and was “afraid of micropenis.” That was the translation, at least: It might have been even worse in the Lithuanian original.

“How gay,” scrawled one whose profile showed him smoking a large cigar (no fear of micropenis!). “So fucking gay.” Another sneered, “This is a scary place for wimps like you.” I was a “fucking liberal” who “throws tantrums.” Other explanations for why I must disapprove of Musk included that I was a loser, a Jew, a peddler of smut, a Hampstead elitist, a typical leftist, and/or subhuman scum.

My favourite was from someone – a huge fan of Tommy Robinson, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, judging by his timeline – who took the trouble to send me a private message advising me: “Get your testosterone levels checked, they seem low. No joke.”

So there we have it: Question Musk and his “anything goes” language, and the conclusion is that you are, at best, a communist and, at worst, an effeminate sex offender.

In addition, a man who makes his living writing for the telegraph accused me of trying to create an alternative “smug left utopia” and I wondered how a telegraph The journalist, like all the other ranters and (I assume) bots, may have missed the point entirely.

Who in the world would want a complacent left utopia? At its best, social media is about being confronted with different viewpoints – with arguments, challenges, coherent debates. My objection to the way Twitter/X is run – or not run – has nothing to do with politics. It is about how the platform is used to incite hatred, if not violence; and – perhaps more importantly – to undermine any sense that some things might be provably true and others not. This used to be important to telegraph journalists.

I believe these reactions are not accidental. You will remember Steve Bannon's powerful phrase from 2018: “Flood the zone with shit.” Author Sean Illing explained its meaning this way: When you flood the media ecosystem with misinformation, you overwhelm everyone's ability to correct it.

“We are dealing with a new form of propaganda, made possible only by the digital age,” he wrote in Vox. “And it works not by creating consensus around a particular narrative, but by muddying the waters so that consensus is unattainable.”

To understand why this is important, one must first look at the fundamentals of how anyone in a democratic society could know that something was true: the system of institutions and norms that kept us collectively tied to reality in some way and allowed us to settle disagreements in a civilized manner.

This system was given a name by the American writer Jonathan Rauch, and it became the title of his excellent book of 2021, TThe constitution of knowledge.

Rauch lists the four areas whose efforts enable us – most of us, anyway – to live in a reality-based community: science and academia, journalism, law, and government. This is the constitution of knowledge – and it is one that has served liberal democracies well for over three centuries.

To escape this reality, you first attack scientists, lawyers, journalists, and the “swamp” or “blob” of government. And then you go further.

Donald Trump has deliberately created a firehose of lies with over 30,000 false statements during his presidency. He has flooded the zone, or as Rauch puts it, “conspiracy bootstrapping” – where you say, “This conspiracy theory could be true” and then spread it – and another classic: attention hijacking.

If you follow Musk closely – which is hard to avoid – you will see that he does the same thing.

“That is what [Tump’s] We do this by behaving shamelessly: we make sure that we can't think of anything else,” says Rauch. “This is a tactic that Hitler used in My Struggle“It doesn't matter if they ridicule us; the important thing is that they can't stop thinking about us. I think Trump is the greatest propaganda genius since Goebbels. And he's better than Putin.”

Musk, along with Rupert Murdoch, is Trump's biggest supporter – and not just Trump. In his almost fanatical mission for absolute freedom of speech without limits, the man-child has invited back to his platform people he knows to be liars, fantasists, conspiracy theorists and deliberate racists.

At the same time, he has cannibalized the teams that have tried, however imperfectly, to combat the worst misinformation and amplify the best. He is literally flooding the zone with shit.

“Think of Twitter as a miniature model of the civil wars and religious conflicts – things like the terrible European religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries – that humanity basically lived with as its standard operating system until about 1700,” says Rauch. saideven before Musk downgraded this area.

“Today we assume that if you leave people to themselves, they will have comfortable conversations that are respectful and honest. That's completely wrong… If you take a completely unstructured environment like Twitter with no guardrails, people aren't going to talk to each other.

“They flaunt their tribal loyalty – they insult the other tribe, they try to outdo each other, they indulge in the confirmation of their biases – and gradually get caught up in tribal warfare.”

This is how the musk wasps behaved last week. QED.

It took centuries of conscious work to build the structure of knowledge that, as Rauch puts it, “saves us from ourselves.” Unbridled social media is doing the opposite, leading to a world in which, as numerous polls show, we know less and less who or what to believe.

It is particularly problematic in the UK, where our so-called traditional media enjoys the least trust – a full 15 percentage points behind Germany or Italy, and eight percentage points behind the US. It is no coincidence that the most trusted media organisation, the BBC, is the target of most vicious abuse. If we destroy the BBC, the Murdoch-Musk universe will become much more powerful.

If Twitter/X becomes the worst social medium, Rauch contrasts it with Wikipedia, “because it was structured around the constitution of knowledge. We have freedom of speech, but also the discipline of facts. You have to be right – to prove you've done your homework. There will be disagreements, and these too will be structured, by Wikipedians who have proven themselves. Wikipedia has shown that with the right incentives, you can transfer an environment of truth-seeking to an online world.”

So, no, I'm not going to get my testosterone levels checked. I'm not yearning for a smug leftist utopia. I just want a space that at least claims to be grounded in reality. Elon's zone has really been flooded with shit. It's time for the lifeboats.