Should Elon Musk be Held Accountable for the stuff he Publishes?
The news business is in trouble.
And if the news business is in trouble, then the whole country is in trouble.
Over the past 10 years, more than 2,400 newspapers in the US have closed. Their business model no longer works, and fewer and fewer people read newspapers.
According to the Pew Research Center, 54% of adults now get their news from social media and an astonishing 83% of people aged 16–25 go to social media for news and information.
If you spend any time on TikTok with its 1.9 billion users or Twitter (now X) with its 550 million users, you can quickly discover that the earth is actualy flat, that no one ever went to the moon and that Zionists carried out 9/11 to make a profit for Larry Silverstein. And that is but the tiny tip of an iceberg that is going to sink democracy.
Musk recently declared that “ 𝕏 is now the #1 news app in the US”
He may be right.
And what kind of ‘news’ is Musk publishing?
Here are two tiny examples of his daily ‘news’ feed:
Or this charming graphic:
Nothing like this has graced the news industry since der Sturmer went out of business in 1945. And you see where der Sturmer and its brand of journalism led Germany.
Elon Musk regularly defends his never-ending firehose of lies and hatred as ‘a free press’. But it is a free press without responsibility and without consequences. Musk is clearly a publisher (of anything that he or his algorthims believe will increase eyeballs), but he is a publisher who takes no responsibility for what he is publishing.
The Second Amendment may guarantee you the right to bear arms, but it doesn’t guarantee you the right to shoot anyone you feel like shooting. Owning a gun carries with it an implicit responsibility about how to use that freedom. Owning a press, I think, should also carry a responsibility for the consequences of what you have chosen to publish and distribute.
In 1996, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 of that law determined that websites cannot be treated as publishers of online content and cannot be held liable for content moderation decisions taken concerning “material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.”
What this means is that Musk is free to publish whatever he wants without bearing any of the consequences of his actions. He is free, of course, to profit from his actions, which he clearly does, both financially and increasingly politically.
A free society should not and must not go down the road of censorship. That having been said, there should be consequences for publishing lies. Fox News paid $757 million as a penalty for knowingly publishing lies about Dominion Voting Systems. This is the inherent check on a free press abusing the freedom to publish. There are consequences for publishing lies. Musk and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube should be treated as publishers. They are in fact, publishers. They sell advertising against their content, just like any other newspaper or TV network. They should be treated as such.
Freedom carries with it responsibility to act with decency, and it should carry penalties if you don’t.
