How Musk’s X Is Turning Europe’s Censorship Regimes ‘Upside Down’
Jarrett Stepman /
Have censorship regimes met their match in Elon Musk?
As I and many others have written recently, discussion of mass Pakistani rape gangs operating with impunity in the United Kingdom has exploded in the past week, even though the story is now more than a decade old.
The details are horrifying and profound. It’s hard to imagine something like that happening on such a scale for so long. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is in hot water as his Labour Party is desperately trying to stop a new national inquiry into the matter.
Starmer has been reduced to the laziest, played-out message; namely, that asking questions about the widespread pedophile rape gangs that operated for years as authorities looked the other way makes you a part of the scary “far right.”
As some folks online say, however: “Far-right” is a stand-in for “right so far.”
Frankly, every person and institution involved in sweeping the issue under the rug should never be involved in public leadership ever again. They’ve brought infamy to their country and stained their souls. Shame on all of them.
Maybe now the victims of these most heinous crimes will get at least the small amount of justice they deserve, albeit belatedly.
What’s happening in the U.K., as this discussion about immigration and the failure of institutions heats up, is part of a much larger story.
What Musk has done is essentially force an American-style political debate onto the U.K. and even more profoundly, onto a European continent that not only doesn’t have a long-standing free speech culture, but has actively tried to do more to censor their own citizens in recent years.
Just listen to how shocked Jessica Phillips, the Labour Party member of parliament who initially shut down the inquiry into the rape gangs, was when she was accused of enabling the groomers.
She said she felt like her world was being turned “upside down.” Ah yes, thousands of young girls, some no more than 11 years old, were repeatedly raped, but won’t somebody think of the poor politicians!
The U.K.’s political establishment isn’t used to dealing with these kinds of direct challenges and accusations. Their world really is being turned “upside down.”
Musk suddenly coming out and praising Germany’s AfD party, which backs immigration restrictions—and generally injecting the immigration question onto European Union countries that have spent decades attempting to shut down debate on the issue—is a seismic shock to the system.
From an American perspective, this may be hard to understand. Most Americans have been raised in a culture that embraces something close to absolutist free speech, even if that isn’t what we have in practice.
Certainly, for many Europeans, whose speech on the immigration issue has been squelched, this must be a refreshing change.
The social media platform X is colliding directly with Europe’s censorship regimes, and right now it’s breaking through. Don’t think those regimes won’t strike back.
For EU countries, such as Germany and France, that tightly control speech in the name of public “safety,” and have nothing like the First Amendment, foisting debates on their country that were once considered off the table is seen as an existential threat.
European politicians and many of their most powerful, established media outlets are now up in arms about Musk’s “meddling” in their political systems.
French President Emmanuel Macron took a potshot at Musk in a speech Monday.
“Ten years ago, who could have imagined it if we had been told that the owner of one of the largest social networks in the world would support a new international reactionary movement and intervene directly in elections, including in Germany,” he said.
The EU is reportedly considering putting regulations on X to prevent Musk from boosting “populist” parties.
Those countries may go even further. There’s been speculation that Starmer and other European leaders may cut ties with the U.S. over the Musk issue because the entrepreneur is so closely aligned with President-elect Donald Trump.
Keep in mind, the EU doesn’t care that X can manipulate political debates in their countries. They are perfectly happy using Big Tech companies to shape public opinion and quash dissent. What they really loathe and fear is that they can’t control the man whose social media platform has become a kind of global newspaper.
Is it good that one man and one social media platform have this much power? On the whole, I’d say “no,” even though I’m happy with the results so far. We shouldn’t need the deus ex machina of one rogue billionaire to restore some semblance of free speech in the West.
But right now, that’s where things stand.
Starmer, Macron, and other world leaders are struggling to put a lid on a media environment that’s radically changed. And as the historical French observer of American life Alexis de Tocqueville noted long ago, countries that suppress free debate and expression and the truth are more likely to explode in revolution once the truth gets out.