Elon Musk has spent much of the past couple of days trying to explain away his offensive antics at Donald Trump’s inauguration. Whether or not it was a deliberate salute, when you support far-right parties in Germany and elsewhere you can hardly act surprised when people put two and two together.
Much of the coverage of Musk centres on his bizarre actions and declarations, and the controversies that have followed. It’s easy to tune it all out as the dronings of a bore. But he’s so much worse than that. He’s already one of the most powerful people on the planet. He’s the world’s wealthiest man, with a fortune of more than $400bn. And despite turning millions of people away from Twitter with his damaging changes to the platform (not least trying to rebrand it as X), he still controls what hundreds of millions of people around the globe see on their feeds.
And now, Musk is also a senior official in the United States government. One of Donald Trump’s first acts in office was to make him co-head of a new commission on slashing regulation on businesses – social media giants, for example. A great return for Musk spending more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help Trump win the election in November.
As a liberal, I am instinctively deeply alarmed by the concentration of so much power in the hands of one individual. Even if I liked Musk, I’d say it was dangerous. I see it as the fundamental purpose of liberals – whether capital L members of the Liberal Democrats, or like-minded people beyond our party and around the world – to hold the powerful to account and put real power in the hands of ordinary people.
That means breaking up concentrations of power wherever we find them. And whether it’s Elon Musk’s control of X or Mark Zuckerberg’s control of Meta, there’s no doubt that the social media and artificial intelligence revolutions have concentrated enormous power in the hands of a few incredibly wealthy people. That is a big problem we need to address.
One of the biggest challenges now facing us all is how to harness the undoubted massive benefits of social media and AI while preventing the serious harms they can cause at the same time. That challenge needs to be tackled by democratic governments, working together in the interests of ordinary people – not by unelected oligarchs interested only in amassing even more wealth and power for themselves.
We cannot leave it to the Musks and Zuckerbergs of this world to set the bounds of free speech for billions of people around the world. We cannot leave it to them to control the flow of information – and misinformation – to so many voters, in so many democracies. We cannot just hope they will use AI for good and never for bad. And we cannot count on them to keep their users safe, especially children.
One person who understands the harms of social media all too well is Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly tragically took her own life at 14 after viewing thousands of images promoting suicide and self-harm on social media. Last week, he rightly warned that Musk and Zuckerberg are moving in the wrong direction: away from crucial safety measures and towards a “flood of preventable harm”.
“In this bonfire of digital ethics and online safety features, all of us will lose, but our children lose the most,” he wrote. And he’s right.
Social media are helping to fuel a mental health crisis among our children and young people, and exposing them to the risk of sexual exploitation. Whether it’s the proliferation of self-harm material or the prevalence of grooming and abuse, X has become a much more dangerous place for children since Musk took over and slashed the platform’s child-safety teams.
Actions speak louder than words, and Musk’s actions tell us that he isn’t really interested in keeping our children safe. And that’s why the power he will wield in the Trump administration should worry us all.
To state the obvious: X and Meta are both US companies with users all around the world. No single country can regulate them alone – whether to tackle the harms of social media or manage the risks of AI. But what the US government does will clearly matter a great deal, not just for Americans but for us all.
And yet we clearly can’t expect President Trump, indebted as he is to his regulation “adviser” Elon Musk, to put preventing harm above growing X’s profits. Nor, of course, can we rely on Trump to do the right thing out of a sense of responsibility.
So, when it comes to social media and AI, it is vital that our own government steps up and leads – in partnership with others, including the EU. Only if we show that leadership and approach both Musk and Trump from a position of strength will we be able to influence them in the right direction.
There’s a lot of work to do to get us to that position of leadership and strength. We urgently need to rebuild our relationship with Europe, broken so badly by the last Conservative government – and that means a far more positive and ambitious approach than Labour has pursued so far.
But we also need to make our own online safety laws fit for purpose, being far tougher in holding social media companies to account for the child abuse, self-harm and other illegal content on their platforms. After all, Elon Musk clearly doesn’t care enough to tackle it himself.
Ed Davey is the leader of the Liberal Democrats and MP for Kingston and Surbiton
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