Social media’s incitement problem can no longer be masked

One way to advance social and political agitation on social media and avoid being suspended from a platform appears to be to own it. When former US President Donald Trump’s Twitter account was suspended in 2021, he started his own platform, Truth Social. Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, later bought Twitter, renamed it X and welcomed back almost everyone. It now seems to be a case of the more incitement and hate speech they supply, the better.
In both cases, the owners of these social media platforms are active and zestful contributors to the spread of fake news and reckless opinions. In the case of Musk, his unwelcome interventions, through his tweets, in the recent racist riots in the UK led a former Twitter executive to suggest that Musk should face “personal sanctions” and even the threat of an “arrest warrant” if found to be stirring up public disorder on his social media platform.
The days of innocence, when we all thought that social media would serve as the “glocal” town square for deliberating social and political matters in the most inclusive and civilized manner, are long gone. Nevertheless, these platforms’ intentional toxicity is unexpected and has resulted in a distorted social discourse, the spread of untruths and the misrepresentation of reality on an industrial scale.
As we witnessed during the recent racist-xenophobic riots in the UK, social media was both a platform for spreading malicious incitement against minorities and migrants and a tool for organizing the many violent attacks against innocent members of the public and the police.
Social media has now existed for more than a quarter of a century and the era of trial and error and of it becoming the wild west of mass communication, promoted disingenuously in the name of freedom of speech and where everything is permissible, must come to an end.
Too much of it, because of the wealth and resultant political power accumulated by its owners, is allowed to spread incitement, malice and libelous claims without any accountability, neither social nor legal. This is not a call to suppress freedom of speech or to abandon social media, as it is here to stay, but it cannot be allowed to operate above the law, especially as it has become a force of disruption and it undermines social order by deliberately distorting reality and putting lives at risk in the process.
Social media must either change voluntarily or it becomes the duty of legislators to protect the public from it. To be sure, for quite some time, major advertisers and many users have been abandoning X, even before Musk’s antitrust lawsuit against brands that have boycotted it and his controversial activity on the platform during the recent UK riots. It is crucial to understand that freedom of expression is not an absolute freedom, as it carries with it a duty of responsibility.

Freedom of expression is not an absolute freedom, as it carries with it a duty of responsibility. 

Yossi Mekelberg

It took devious cynicism melded with extremism — at a time when a community was grieving over the fatal stabbing of three young girls, as was the case earlier this month in the northern English town of Southport — for far-right agitators to take to social media and spread misinformation and hateful anti-migrant and anti-Muslim narratives with the sole aim of fueling hatred and violence.
Posts appeared on X sharing the fake name of the perpetrator and were viewed by millions, contributing to one of the worst outbursts of mob violence in the country’s history. The role of moderators on social media, people responsible for managing and regulating user-generated content on digital platforms and in online communities, was created specifically to prevent such instances.
When these platforms are used to incite and organize criminal activities that target innocent people and those who serve to protect the public, they must not be allowed to host such criminals with impunity. Proper and effective sanctions must be applied not only against the users that spread hate and disinformation, but also on those who run these social media companies and make a fortune from them.
It gets worse when the owners of these platforms weigh in with their two cents, or 280 characters, or allow those with many thousands and sometimes millions of followers to amplify the initial fake claims of those with much more modest audiences.
And it was Musk who welcomed such people back to X. Allowing the presence of characters such as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, and Andrew Tate to have a presence on social media despite their previous antics is as good as endorsing their views. If one wanted to be kind to Musk, one could simply accuse him of being extremely naive in his belief in absolute freedom of speech, but more likely he is simply exploiting such characters to enhance his brand and his public profile, just as they use him to disseminate their social poison.
In the case of Musk, it is not only that he provided facilitation services to the organizers of the riots, but also that he weighed in recklessly in the most damaging manner, with interventions that some have suggested are worthy of criminal investigation. When the riots erupted, Musk, who has some 195 million followers, took to his X account and suggested that “civil war is inevitable.” When, sadly, too many people see social media accounts — and especially the users with huge followings — as modern-day oracles, the damage is bound to be immense.
Musk also shared with his followers a fake Daily Telegraph article claiming that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer was considering sending far-right rioters to “emergency detainment camps” in the Falkland Islands, a claim that originated from the co-leader of the far-right group Britain First. Doing this during the most volatile period of the riots and calling the prime minister “two-tier Keir,” thereby advancing another baseless conspiracy theory that police are treating white far-right “protesters” more harshly than minority groups, was a deliberate case of adding fuel to the fire with potentially catastrophic consequences.
This irresponsible behavior unsurprisingly led to suggestions that the new Labour government was considering toughening up internet safety regulations in the UK, through legislation that would require tech giants to prevent the spread of illegal and harmful content on their platforms. If the social media companies will not put their house in order, it is the duty of legislators to enter the fray with much more determination. Moreover, the education system must also play its part and coach children from a very young age the responsible use of social media. Then it can perhaps do what it was intended to do in the first place: give a voice to everyone in society and not present a mere Punch and Judy show.

• Yossi Mekelberg is professor of international relations and an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House. X: @YMekelberg