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” 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, it’s to Britain that the US needs to look. To rioters in the streets and 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, 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.
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”.
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 of dozens of academics and has chilled an entire field of research. Whole university departments have collapsed, including the Stanford Internet Observatory whose election integrity unit provided rapid detection and analysis in 2020.
Even the FBI has 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 half its trust and safety team. But then so has every tech company we know about. Thousands of workers previously employed to sniff out misinformation have been laid off by Meta, TikTok, Snap and Discord.
Just last week, Facebook killed off one of its last remaining transparency tools, CrowdTangle, 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 to 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 back 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.
