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INCITING RIOTERS IN BRITAIN WAS A TEST RUN FOR ELON MUSK. JUST SEE
WHAT HE PLANS FOR AMERICA  
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Carole Cadwalladr
August 18, 2024
The Guardian
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_ The presidential election is now two months away. What if the
billionaire contests the result? What if he decides democracy is
over-rated? This was Elon Musk's role in England. Now Trump is
proposing him as our new Efficiency Czar. _

Police in the northern English city of Rotherham struggled to hold
back a group of far-right activists in July, who broke into a hotel
believed to be housing asylum seekers.,

 

Just over three years ago, an insurrectionist mob found each other
online, descended on Washington, stormed the Capitol and threatened
the vice-president with a noose. But that was the good old days.
We’re living in a different reality now. One in which the
billionaires have been unchained.

Because back in the golden days of 2020, tech platforms, still reeling
from a public backlash, had at least to look as if they gave a shit.
Twitter employed 4,000-plus people in “trust and safety”, tasked
with getting dangerous content off its platform and sniffing out
foreign influence operations. Facebook tried to ignore public pressure
but eventually banned political ads that sought to “delegitimise
voting [[link removed]]” and scores
of academics and researchers in “election integrity” units worked
to identify and flag dangerous disinformation.

But still, vast swathes of the American population became convinced
the vote had been stolen and a violent mob almost pulled off a coup.
Fast forward four years, and we’re now in a very different – and
significantly worse – place.

Because while Kamala Harris is enjoying her hot girl summer and
liberal America is sighing with relief
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it’s to Britain that the US needs to look. To rioters in the
streets
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burning cars and contagious, uncontained racism spreading like
wildfire across multiple platforms. To lies amplified and spread by
algorithms long before the facts have been reported, laundered and
whitewashed by politicians and professional media grifters.

Because just as Brexit prefigured Donald Trump’s election in 2016,
there are signs that we are again the canary in the coalmine. The same
transatlantic patterns, the same playbook, the same figures. But this
time with a whole new set of dangerous, unchecked technological
vulnerabilities to be exploited.

The streets are – for now – quiet. The violence has been crushed.
But this is Britain, where extremist political violence is someone
carrying a brick and throwing a chair leg. In America, there aren’t
just automatic weapons and rights to openly carry firearms, there are
actual militias. Regardless of how well Harris is doing in the polls,
America is facing a singularly dangerous moment, whoever wins the
election.

Because as Trump has already showed us and as Jair Bolsonaro learned
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it’s not even necessarily about winning any more. Or even about a
single day. The entire period between the result and the inauguration
is an anything-can-happen moment not just for America but for the
world.

In Britain, the canary has sung. This summer we have witnessed
something new and unprecedented. The billionaire owner of a tech
platform publicly confronting an elected leader and using his platform
to undermine his authority and incite violence. Britain’s 2024
summer riots were Elon Musk’s trial balloon
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If Musk chooses to ‘predict’ a civil war in the States, what will
that look like?

He got away with it. And if you’re not terrified by both the
extraordinary supranational power of that and the potential
consequences, you should be. If Musk chooses to “predict” a civil
war in the States, what will that look like? If he chooses to contest
an election result? If he decides that democracy is over-rated? This
isn’t sci-fi. It’s literally three months away.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. For a brief minute after 2016,
there was an attempt to understand how these tech platforms had been
used to spread lies and falsehoods – or mis- and disinformation –
as we came to know them and to try to prevent it. But that moment has
passed. A years-long effort by Republican operatives to politicise the
entire subject of “misinformation” has won. It barely even now
exists in US tech circles. Anyone who suggests it does –
researchers, academics, “trust and safety” teams – are now all
part of the “censorship industrial complex
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A US congressional committee headed by Republican Jim Jordan,
convinced that big tech was silencing conservative voices, went on the
warpath. It subpoenaed the email history
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dozens of academics and has chilled an entire field of research. Whole
university departments have collapsed, including the Stanford
Internet Observatory
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election integrity unit provided rapid detection and analysis in 2020.

Even the FBI
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been prevented from communicating with tech companies about what
officials have warned is a coming onslaught of foreign disinformation
and influence operations after a lawsuit brought by two attorneys
general went all the way to the supreme court. The _New York
Times_ reported that it has only just now quietly resumed.

All this has provided the perfect cover for the platforms to step
back. Twitter, now X, has sacked at least
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its trust and safety team. But then so has every tech company we know
about
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Thousands of workers previously employed to sniff out misinformation
have been laid off by Meta, TikTok, Snap and Discord
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Just last week, Facebook killed off one of its last remaining
transparency tools, CrowdTangle
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a tool that was crucial in understanding what was happening online
during the dark days before and after the 2021 inauguration. It did
this despite the pleas of researchers and academics, just because it
could.

In 2020, these efforts seemed pathetic, paltry, inadequate to the
scale of the threat. Now they’re gone, just as the tools are
becoming even more dangerous. Last week, OpenAI crowed about finding
an Iranian group that used ChatGPT
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run a US election influence campaign, which would have been more
impressive if the last that was heard from its trust and safety team
was when it was dissolved
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in May after its co-founders resigned.

But what Musk – the new self-appointed Lord of Misrule – has done
is to rip off the mask. He’s shown that you don’t even have to
pretend to care. In Musk’s world, trust is mistrust and safety is
censorship. His goal is chaos. And it’s coming.

_[CAROLE CADWALLADR is a reporter and feature writer for the
Observer]_

_ This article was amended on 22 August 2024 because an earlier
version, referring to the storming of the US Capitol, said it occurred
“just over four years ago”. The incident occurred on 6 January
2021 – over three years ago. Also a reference to “the 2020
inauguration” should have been to the 2021 inauguration._

* britian
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* England
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* Racism
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* race
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* Elon Musk
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* Donald Trump
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* 2024 Elections
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* democracy
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* Jan. 06
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* Capitol riot
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* transition of power
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* rule of law
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* Right-wing agenda
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* MAGA
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* Insurrection
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* Project 2025
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* Heritage Foundation
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* Agenda 47
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* GOP
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* Fascism
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* Racist vigilantes
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