If there is one thing that can be said about Elon Musk, whether you like him or not, he is certainly an argument for the great man theory of history. Rather than the human story just being just a series of social forces pushing us like waves, a single individual can steer events in a totally different direction.

Before Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the social media site was driving the English-speaking world towards more progressive social norms, and it’s unlikely that the Great Awokening would have happened without it, especially both the Black Lives Matter and the transgender movement. The former culminated with the summer protests of 2020 when 19 people were killed in the United States and several billion dollars’ worth of damage was caused. (Smaller protests in Britain resulted in some police officers being injured, and its effects on our institutions were considerable.)

It did so because Twitter users came from a very specific, socially radical section of society and were pushing culture as a whole (as Kristian Niemietz likes to point out, Twitter is now real life.) Because there was social pressure to conform to certain progressive views, so there was a general drift to the left, which historian Tom Holland likened to the hoplite phalanx in classical Greece, where the body of men would invariably drift in one direction as each sought the protection of their comrade’s shield beside them.

The organisation itself and its employees had a progressive tilt and its system of moderation was clearly run in a partial way, in particular with users being banned for pointing out biological facts.

That issue is what provoked Elon Musk to buy the site. Musk is opposed to what he calls the ‘woke mind virus’ and was animated by the case of his own transgender child. His purchase changed the nature of Twitter dramatically, and with it the direction of politics; he introduced a free-speech policy that encouraged far more right-wing users to join and even amnestied many who had previously been banned, as well as reversing the shadow-banning rumoured to suppress some users. He has also tweeted several conservative or at least anti-woke talking points, his most recent being on the global history of slavery. On top of this, he signal-boosts several right-wing accounts and this week even went as far as sharing a fake headline posted by the co-leader of Britain First, a tiny, ultra-right wing group so far outside of the Overton Window it can’t be seen on the horizon.

Now Musk is at war with the British government over free speech, repeatedly tweeting about ‘two-tier Kier’ and some of the harsh sentences handed out after the riots. He seems to be having a good time and, if I’m honest, if I was one of the world’s richest men I’d probably use the money to launch my own one-man war against the British establishment.

That establishment seems rather keen on the conflict and, seemingly unable to do anything about the underlying problems, many in Britain have blamed Musk for recent unrest. Jessica Simor, a prominent human rights lawyer, has suggested that Twitter be closed down, insisting that:  ‘Freedom of speech is not an absolute right in Europe; it is a qualified right. This means Musk that it is criminal to incite racial hatred and/or violence; exactly what X has been allowing and you have been doing. We had fascism and mass murder in Europe – we don’t want it again.’ (It’s worth noting that in 2016 Simor was Britain’s nominee for Judge at the European Court of Human Rights.)

Even people with nominally liberal opinions think that free speech shouldn’t mean ‘the untrammelled capacity to spread disinformation’. A Leeds MP said that ‘Free Speech is not the same as hate speech. Responsible bodies have a duty to protect people from hate speech in democratic societies.’ Yet one might say that free speech is the same as hate speech, and it’s entirely a matter of definition and perception.

Journalists have suggested that Elon be banned from Britain, and a senior police officer has said that Americans could be ‘extradited’ over their posts (good luck with that). Others compare Twitter under Musk to Paris under Nazi occupation.

I happen to agree with Musk that Britain’s free speech laws are troubling, even if comparisons with the Soviet Union are silly (the USSR imprisoned 200,000 people just for telling jokes). Britain suffers worse from the extremes of American-driven progressivism because we have no First Amendment, which means that people regularly get arrested and prosecuted simply for saying or posting things.

To think that this isn’t a problem strikes me as complacent, and there is something especially depressing about having the ‘Larry the Cat’ account explain to Musk that Britain does actually have freedom of speech because of the Human Rights Act, something which perfectly encapsulates the combination of British twee, smugness and midwittery. Believing that we do have freedom of speech because the law says so is a bit naïve, when Russia, China and North Korea also make the same claim.

Membership of the Human Rights Act and European Court of Human Rights are among those things British centrists define as what makes a grown-up country, and withdrawing would put us in the same camp as Russia and Belarus; perhaps they might like to ponder the countries where Twitter is banned.

Yet that is at least the direction in which we are heading, and as the Telegraph reports, a review of the Online Safety Bill could force tech companies ‘to take down or restrict the visibility of content deemed to be dangerous but not against the law’.

Blaming communication technology for unrest is nothing new, of course. Printing certainly unleashed the Reformation, as well as fuelling the witch-crazes with pamphlets written by excitable partisans fuelling fear of the out-group. The French Revolution followed a sudden and rapid explosion in newspaper consumption among Parisians in the late 18th century. The turmoil in America in the 1960s, for both good and ill, was directly linked to the spread of the television, Martin Luther King in particular being skilled at using the soundbite for the evening news slot. Facebook spread the Arab Spring, and it will be interesting to see how many who supported that now call for a clampdown on social media. And now we have Twitter, which fuelled first the Great Awokening and whatever this is.

Neither is it unusual for people to reach for bizarre outside forces to explain disorder. After the Broadwater Farm riot, the Daily Express sensed the hand of the Kremlin. The Birmingham riots in 2005 were blamed on pirate radio stations, and the London riots six years later were attributed to BlackBerry Messenger.

What is different now is the power of one particular social media platform, and the clear political agenda of its owner. This is different in scale to almost any media in the past, including newspapers at their over-mighty zenith, and presents challenges to traditional ideas of free speech, since Musk has far more power to voice his opinion than almost anyone now or previously.

He has arguably used that power to amplify some quite unpleasant people, one reason that Jonathan Freedland blamed Musk for the recent unrest (although he doesn’t actually call on him to be charged, as the headline suggests).

‘He decided to make X a safe space for racism and hate almost as soon as he bought it,’ Freedland wrote: ‘The effect was instant. One analysis of tweets found a “nearly 500 per cent increase in use of the N-word in the 12-hour window immediately following the shift of ownership to Musk”. The same study also found that posts including “the word ‘Jew’ had increased fivefold since before the ownership transfer”, and something tells me those tweets weren’t tributes to the comic style of Mel Brooks.’

It’s certainly true that Twitter is now swarming with some incredibly racist users and it’s often quite grim. These days I’ll see some mad looking account tweeting about Muslims enforcing Sharia Law on Britain and click to see ‘500,000 followers’. It seems to be everywhere: oh look, there’s a guy with cartoons of Africans looking like cannibals, there’s the guy in Cambodia tweeting about how ‘Europe has fallen’, here’s yet another joke about the N-word.

Yet the problem is more to do with incivility than misinformation in my view, the biggest downside of ‘free speech’. Freedland suggested that ‘It’s clear that schools should be teaching information hygiene, so children learn to avoid fake news the way they would avoid poisonous food. Clear, too, that we need online safety legislation with teeth and if, as Sadiq Khan has suggested, that means toughening up laws so new they are yet to be fully implemented, so be it.’

Yet evidence of a misinformation epidemic is actually very thin, and ‘fake news’ is a very nebulous concept.

After all, most newspapers regularly run articles about women committing sex crimes which are clearly carried out by men. Is that fake news? Misinformation? What about the 120,000 killed by austerity, much repeated but untrue? What about Brexit being orchestrated by the Russians? What about misinformation spread by groups exaggerating threats and violence to minorities, such as Hope Not Hate, whose spokesman claimed that a Muslim woman had been attacked with acid – the same Hope Not Hate which Freedland quoted as experts?

The entire BLM movement was spurred by misinformation about specific incidents involving police brutality and misinformation about statistics. The catchphrase ‘Hands up don’t shoot’, spread across the media and by protesters, was never uttered. There has been no reckoning for this, there were no calls to shut down Twitter, and yet the Floyd protests were lethal. Maybe underlying racism is still an issue that should be addressed, but actual misinformation behind the BLM movement led to many deaths.

Even citing a statistic is misinformation and fake news if other relevant statistics are left out. The Guardian, for instance, regularly reports on disparities in arrest or imprisonment rates between different groups, without mentioning that these actually reflect disparities in crime rates. Is that misinformation? Incitement?

Similarly, dozens of churches in Canada were attacked, some burned down, over misinformation in the press about indigenous children being killed and buried in Christian schools, among the newspapers promoting this story being the Guardian in a number of articles. That entire story turned out to be a fabrication. The only difference between that sort of fake news, and the bad kind, is that journalists don’t feel uncomfortable repeating it.

There is much to criticise over Elon-era Twitter, and opinion seems divided over whether it as got worse, but one solid improvement is Community Notes, which would have made a huge difference to the 2013-2020 discourse. Since Musk took over, many potentially influential tweets have been stopped in their tracks because they are community-noted, including several claims of racist police brutality which have turned out to be misleading.

There are also many cases where social media has been more correct than the mainstream, such as when the BBC and several others reported that Israelis had bombed a hospital in Gaza. That ‘fake news’ had catastrophic effects.

If the authorities are keen to clamp down on social media, then the past week has only further cemented the idea that mainstream institutions cannot really be trusted to report the truth.

Indeed, many incidents from the past week would probably not have been reported otherwise, including the many instances of white people being attacked in UK cities. These would have gone unreported because journalists in mainstream news outlets find it too distasteful to report and a threat to community relations.

Alex Thomson, chief correspondent and presenter for Channel 4 News, posted a number of videos over the weekend showing ‘Mobs of Asian men’ attacking ‘lone white individuals’ in Middlesbrough. He then deleted them.

Even the BBC reporting of the incident in Birmingham was designed not to tell anyone anything about who was doing what.

It is true that the political atmosphere on Twitter is almost irredeemably grim and depressing now, but this trend has gone in tandem with the media becoming more and more opaque.

The finale to the week’s protests will only have further eroded people’s sense of confidence, with the obviously implausible threats of nationalist marches in London, including such totally absurd locations like Walthamstow. Presumably it suited both the virtually non-existent far-right to claim to be able to mobilise an army, and for the groups of Londoners to gather together and LARP the Spanish Civil War for the thousandth time. The fact that most newspapers ran with this same narrative of Britain United, siding with the ‘anti-fascist’ protesters brandishing Socialist Worker placards, will only have fuelled suspicion about the media’s curating of the news.

The more that media comes to be seen as biased and engaged in curating a narrative, the more that social media will become extreme, a positive feedback loop which Scott Alexander once explained in a post called Neutral vs Conservative – as the mainstream in the US drew left, conservatives went off to form their own ghettos, which further pushed those institutions even more left:

So there we have Twitter. Many regular users are now fleeing the site for other climes, and it does feel like there is something of a brain drain, although perhaps ‘status-drain’ is a better term. I can understand this to some extent, since the site does seem to be more unpleasant; it’s upsetting when your community gets disrupted by the arrival of unvetted outsiders who don’t share your values and change the atmosphere.

I’ve often likened our age to the Reformation, but in this analogy the roles are reversed, with an overarching central authority trying to control and muffle thousands of uncontrollable independent clerics preaching their own morality, many of them clearly mad and dangerous. Perhaps, if I were to stretch this analogy to breaking point, Elon Musk represents to the Cathedral the figure of the Devil. But he is certainly, in the historical sense, a great man.

This article first appeared in Ed West’s Wrong Side of History Substack.