Is behaviour on X / Twitter dangerous?
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In recent months, Elon Musk has been very vocal on ex-formerly Twitter about various political issues both in the US and Europe. But is his behaviour on ex-

dangerous. I'm joined in the studio now by John Brennan, Professor in European Politics at Maynooth University and Eoin O'Malley, Associate Professor of Politics at DCU. Gentlemen, good evening and welcome to the programme. Thanks very much indeed for joining us.

John, let me start with you. Elon Musk tweets an awful lot. I was going through his timeline of tweets. He retweets, he's tweeting himself or X-ing or whatever you call it now. Is he doing that himself? Does he have the phone permanently glued to his hand? Well, I'm sure he is doing it himself because it's so eccentric and bizarre. I don't think he could possibly have people employed to do what he does himself.

I think, however, there's been this tendency to kind of frame him as almost a cartoon character or a cartoon villain, a Bond villain, if you will. And I don't think he is that. It reminds me a bit of the way Trump was framed in 2015 when he first decided to run for the presidency.

It was much later that people began to take him seriously. And I think people should take Musk seriously because he is an enormously dangerous man. He's one of the richest men the world has ever seen, certainly in the modern era. He

He has become now the most powerful oligarch in the United States after spending $270 million to get Trump elected. He was almost ever present in Mar-a-Lago in the days after the election. And you could see in the debate about whether the government was going to shut down a couple of weeks ago.

He was actively weighing in and saying to any Republican congressmen who were not going to side with him, I will throw my money behind other rivals in primary campaigns. So that's that part. But on this side of the Atlantic, and this has been the focus of much of what he's been doing today, he's also increasingly interfering in British politics.

The attack in Magdeburg in Germany a couple of weeks ago, it was just completely disgraceful because the perpetrator, who admittedly was a very complicated individual, his background and so on,

He was clearly a supporter of the Alternative for Deutschland, the right-wing German political party. And in the hours after the attack, Musk was out there, of course, claiming that this was a classic open borders problem and that this terrorist had infiltrated from the Muslim world.

Now, as it turned out, he was a supporter of the AFD and he had made that very clear, but they cleansed his timeline on X. So they expunged all of those pro-AFD posts that that man had made. That's just one example of the danger that he represents. And there's an enormous anger in Germany about this. And I think there's a determination to do something about it. We can go on to talk about that maybe a little bit later because that brings in the European Union level and...

That's why I think Musk is so opposed to outlets like the EU, because the one thing people like him do not want is regulation, anything that prevents them doing what they're doing. If I can come to you, Owen, a lot of people believe that Twitter for a long time was a bit of a cesspit, but ever since Musk took over, it is the ultimate in social media cesspit. What would you say to that?

It's the same as it ever was, I would have thought. I mean, it probably has. It's not worse, no restriction whatsoever? I would have thought it probably has changed in that now there is a little more freedom of speech and with that more freedom of speech, you do get a slightly more unpleasant speech and you also, I mean, it might reflect...

Me in some way, but I mean, what I tend to see is that there are a lot more, there seems to be a lot more porn bots on Twitter than anything else. I mean, a lot of people kind of talk about that the hard right is being always being pushed on things. I don't know whether that is true or not. I mean, I'd agree with John in that

he is that Elon Musk is a dangerous individual, but I'm not sure that it's his ownership of Twitter or X that makes him a dangerous individual. I think he's a dangerous individual because he's exceptionally wealthy. He's got influence over one of the most important, most powerful men on the planet. And I think what you can see is that he's dangerous insofar as

He's trying to privatise a lot of the US state. He's trying to interfere in government action in ways that will directly profit him. But I'm not sure that his danger is as a result of his ownership of Twitter. I mean, he, you know, a lot of people kind of say, and I saw one article

one newspaper say, oh, he's out of control today and somebody has to do something to rein him in. I think they were asking Keir Starmer to rein him in. But I mean, I've muted him a long time ago because I have no interest in listening to his ranting. But I mean, he's one of millions of people on that, hundreds of millions of people on that platform who do say things and occasionally, and he often says kind of weird stuff. But I'm not sure that there's any situation

You don't believe there's a need to silence people like this and people with the sorts of opinions that Musk is throwing out there? Well, you can't silence people just because of their opinions and because they might hold unpleasant opinions. Trying to silence people because they hold unpleasant opinions is inherently dangerous because then we have to decide who gets to decide what is the pleasant, what's the acceptable opinion.

and what's an unacceptable opinion, which is a bit like why we were right to try and force, to push against, and Musk indeed was one of the people who pushed against the Irish hate speech laws because you were going to be asking people

probably judges who will have a certain worldview to make decisions as to what constitutes hate or not. So I think the fear of him is not of what he says, not for his ownership of X. And I think the reaction, if we were to react to any danger that Musk is to a democracy and particularly to the US, I think it would be misreported

we'd miss the point if we were to try and regulate speech on Twitter. Because the minute we start to regulate speech, it is, I think, an incredibly dangerous thing to do. And if we take something that has been highlighted this week again on Twitter...

has been the grooming gangs in the north of England, or the rape gangs in the north of England, which by all admission, by journalists have admitted it, the police has now admitted it, Crime Prosecution Service has admitted it, politicians have admitted that they just didn't want to touch it because they were afraid of being labelled racist. And

That issue was kind of just, and in fact, the only person who ended up, not the only person, there were some Labour MPs did kind of talk about it. But one of the few people who was talking about it, was willing to talk about it openly, was somebody like Tommy Robinson, who is not a pleasant individual, whose politics are extreme. And we end up... But being retweeted constantly by Elon Musk, getting involved in something that's internal to the UK. Yeah.

I mean, it's internal to the UK, but I mean, there are a lot of people on Twitter in Ireland who will happily talk about internal US politics. I don't see that on any sort of platform that will talk about internal US politics. So I don't think he should be disallowed from doing so. I don't think because he's wealthy, he should be disallowed from doing so. And I don't think because he's got a lot of followers, he's actually especially influential. There's

almost no good evidence that social media has an impact on elections. Do you believe that, John? No, I disagree. And I think political scientists like us own have been asleep at the wheel for far too long. And I just want to go back to the US election to demonstrate this, the presidential election.

Musk has 210 million followers on Twitter. You're right, of itself, that's kind of irrelevant. Twitter matters, X matters to people like us in journalism and academia and in politics and so on. But the point really is about the amplification effects from what he says. And we know that the Democrats in the election campaign, they campaigned in the traditional way. One of the reasons I thought, and I was completely wrong, that Harris would win in

In the final weekend, Democrats knocked on millions of doors, they said, in places like Pennsylvania. Trump did none of that. But what he did was to master the podcasting world in particular. And he found new audiences that Democrats simply did not find. And there you see the connection, I think, between the ex-world that he dominates now. And it is genuinely very dangerous.

I keep meeting people who have really good education, people with advanced master's degrees, and they believe the worst kind of conspiracy BS you can imagine because their worlds have narrowed. We have no common reference points anymore. I was teaching a course about the end of democracy this term. I asked 30 students had they seen Succession.

the recently very successful Tejano series, one person in the class out of 30 had seen it.

That would never have been the case 20 years ago. So we're almost talking about different worlds. And he really dominates that space now. And he is dangerous and it needs regulation. And this is where the European Union... Well, that's what I was about to ask you. The European Union, for example, Trump's own platform, Truth Social, you have to duck and dive to even try and download that onto your phone here in the European Union. Do you see more EU regulation coming down the tracks that would...

affect somebody like Musk and Dex? Well, firstly, there's a big difference between jurisdictions. There's virtually no media regulation at all in the United States, certainly no social media regulation. In Europe now, we have the Digital Services Act. It will come fully into force on the 24th of February. It's been about two years in different stages of enactment.

So what that will mean is that our policymakers have the tools to tackle these proprietors who refuse to even engage with the amount of disinformation that's on their platforms. It could potentially lead to Musk being banned from the European landscape.

If he goes on behaving in the way that he has been behaving. But what has he done? Continually inciting. If you look at today's tweets, for example, including one about Jess Phillips. So you're not now talking about, you're talking about him as a user of the platform, not the owner of the platform. Exactly. And this is what makes him different, I would say, to people like Rupert Murdoch in the past.

because he's a direct participant in this. But if I were to start saying, if I said the same things that he said, would you say that Owen O'Malley should be banned and taken off that platform? Well, if you are inciting hatred against somebody, I think that's a very serious thing. And we have laws at national level across Europe and elsewhere that can deal with these things. Would you see, John, would you see...

himself being banned or the whole platform? Like I said, Truth Social, Donald Trump's own platform you can't download in the European Union. Do you see that happening here? I am absolutely sure that after what happened in Germany, Germans in particular are saying to the European Commission, we have got to properly now enact the Digital Services Act. So typically what that would mean would dialogue between the European Commission and the platform involved. It

could potentially then go to court, I think we may well see an expedited process. And we'll get a real test of all of this, I think, in the German federal election, which is coming up at the end of the day. Eoin, you don't see the need for this? Well, one of my problems with the move into regulating speech is that you then start...

banning speech. And if you look at, for instance, the issue of the transgender issue, which for years you could not say anything on Twitter because it was immediately taken down and you were labelled hatred or transphobic. Yeah.

It does not allow a discussion of what is a public policy issue that should be discussed openly. And you can see that those people who've moved to Blue Sky, they just banned any discussion of that because they don't like it. I think it's a far healthier society where you do have a discussion of issues

But Owen, that doesn't account for the way in which the algorithms have been manipulated. One study, for example, in the US presidential election showed that in the week before the election, 75% of the posts were Republican Trump supporting posts, that they had been so manipulated, it was 75-25%.

And you see that obviously as a direct influence on politics. Of course it is. It couldn't just be that a lot of people had withdrawn from Twitter because they didn't like it because now Elon Musk owns it. I don't think it was that. I think it was deliberate manipulation and there's a whole pattern of it. And I think it has to be tackled properly through regulation.

I could talk to you all night, gentlemen. Thank you very much indeed for joining us. Unfortunately, time has caught up with us. Ona Malley, Associate Professor of Politics at DCU and John O'Brennan, Professor in European Politics in Maynooth University. Thanks very much indeed, both of you, for joining us. The Hard Shoulder with Ciarán Cudahy. With the MG Hybrid and Electric range. Weekdays from 4 on Newstalk.

Thank you.

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