Musk, Zuckerberg, and the war on truth
Elon Musk has cemented his position as the world’s biggest troll. The rest of us will have to live in the fact-free world he and his fellow tech bros seem intent on creating…
It shouldn’t need pointing out that Elon Musk doesn’t care — at all — about the victims of child sexual abuse in towns and cities across England.
To the world’s biggest troll, they’re just the latest justification for his loosely targeted flamethrower of idiocy — a handy peg on which to hang his bizarre, and presumably temporary, obsession with British politics and politicians.
You might imagine that, days away from following Donald Trump into the White House, he would have better things to do. Apparently not.
Musk is either ill-informed or lying — probably both — when he falsely claims the grooming scandal has gone unreported. Journalists have been highlighting the outrageous abuse of vulnerable young girls, and the inexcusable inaction from agencies meant to protect them, over the past two decades. Neither Musk, nor his legion of conspiracy-addled followers, appear to have noticed.
As chief prosecutor in England and Wales, Keir Starmer overhauled the rules to force police and prosecutors to improve the treatment of victims. So no, he shouldn’t be in prison for his role in the scandal — he should probably be congratulated, as he was in a Parliamentary report before he was even a backbench MP.
The trigger for this tsunami of misinformation was the decision by safeguarding minister Jess Phillips to turn down a request for a national public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham, a town whose police and local authority have already been found to have failed vulnerable children.
Echoing the decision of the previous Conservative government, she said it was for the town to stage its own inquiry. Context regularly downplayed by GB News, as it grimly amplified the story to fuel its outrage perpetuation machine.
And this is where Elon Musk enters the story, calling Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” and a “witch” who should apparently be in jail alongside Starmer.
The fact that there are few MPs, or public figures, who have done as much as Phillips to protect women and girls from violence and abuse did not prompt a re-evaluation by Musk. Instead, this narcissistic dimwit doubled down.
This stuff has real-world consequences. Jess Phillips has been threatened multiple times as a result of Musk’s false accusations. It’s worth remembering the white supremacist who murdered more than 50 people in New Zealand in 2019 used a gun with “for Rotherham” scrawled on it — one of the towns at the centre of the grooming scandal.
It’s a depressing statement on the impact major newspapers and broadcasters now have that, for so many people, this is the first they have heard of this scandal. It does not mean that Elon Musk has performed some kind of public service.
What it has done is demonstrate the grim state of modern politics. Not only has Musk used victims of abuse as a tool for whatever Bond-villain plan he is working towards, the leaders of at least two political parties have fallen over themselves to trail behind him, grifting for votes just as so many talking heads grift for relevance by parroting ever-more extreme hot takes on programmes and channels reliant on constant outrage.
While Musk’s outbursts have little merit or basis in fact, they have fuelled more than a week of feverish news coverage. This buffoon now has the power to tilt a nation’s news agenda in whatever direction he chooses.
Musk will eventually move onto another target — probably Germany’s coming election, or the ones in Canada or Australia — with as little care for the damage he has done as he had for the abuse victims whose plight he pretended to care about.
Things are set to get worse. Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed that — in the US at least — Meta will abandon fact-checking, painting it as a form of partisan censorship, as if there were a moral equivalence between facts and lies.
One after the another, the tech bros are bending the knee before Donald Trump, and the rest of us are left to live with the consequences.
Journalists will, of course, continue to point out when Trump, Musk and the like are lying. But increasingly, they won’t be believed either. We don’t just appear to have had enough of experts, it seems we are tired of the truth as well.
