Fresh from pouring his money and energies into helping Donald Trump win reelection, Elon Musk has trained his sights on Europe, setting off alarm bells among politicians across the continent.
The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive has endorsed the far-right Alternative for Germany, demanded the release of jailed U.K. anti-Islam extremist Tommy Robinson and called British Prime Minister Keir Starmer an evil tyrant who should be in prison.
It’d help to be more than alarmed and actually take action against the threat.
I think it might be too late. We just don’t have the mechanics in place to manage this type of threat.
Take for example Musk’s “lottery” in the US. If not technically contrary to law, very much contrary to the spirit of the law, and while I suspect that some kind of “action” was commenced, it was certainly never progressed in any meaningful way. Closing the gate not only after the proverbial horse has bolted, but after that horse has run amok, sired a foal on the prize mare, and grown old and died.
It was hard enough when nana was sharing memes on facebook or your second cousin was getting radicalised on youtube. Now social platforms are openly influencing “engagement” with bots, very obviously supporting far right rhetoric in the name of “free speech”, and avoiding any suppression of misinformation.
How hard is it to ban his stupid fucking propaganda outlet
Liberal “they go low, we go high” hard.
I was there when the first far-right parties took hold in Europe. Politicians were looking into censoring the shit out of them from the internet, but then “free speech absolutists” started to cry “that would be like the Soviet Union, they killed a lot more people than the nazis”.
While European nazis doxxed people for calling them nazis, redefining the word “racism” to mean “irrational hatred of an ethnic group with the sole intent of evil”, etc., hate speech laws did not catch up with them. We even had early examples of nazis radicalizing gamers through shitty games (one infamous example is by Hungarian “centrist satirist” Tamás “Tomcat” Polgár, by writing the most (in)famous Hungarian language text adventure games, filled with “satirical” racism), and I wouldn’t be surprised if the alt-right later on learned from their successes and mistakes.
Best we got is Hungary expanding the definition of Holocaust denial to include the “um, ackchually, we’re only questioning the suspiciously high numbers” types, which is now barely enforced by Fidesz.
“Freedom of speech” now means “freedom to be racist”.