Musk is an arsonist with a huge box of matches – we need political leaders to stand up

Let me remind you of a different age, not so very long ago. The leader of the Conservative Party felt he wanted to get to know his country better, and so travelled to Birmingham to stay a night in the home of an ordinary Muslim family.

This was 2007. The leader was David Cameron, and he accepted the hospitality of Shahida and Abdullah Rehman. The latter was a community organiser in Balsall Heath, and Cameron came away deeply impressed by the values, strength and cohesion of the British Asian families he met during his trip.

Their sense of civic responsibility, he wrote on his return to London, “puts the rest of us to shame”.

After trying some chicken tikka at the local Karachi Cafe and putting in a shift at the local Raja Brothers supermarket, he wrote in almost hyperbolic terms about what he’d discovered.

“Not for the first time, I found myself thinking that it is mainstream Britain which needs to integrate more with the British Asian way of life, not the other way around.”

OK, it was in some senses a stunt from the same man who urged us to hug a hoodie and had cajoled some Arctic huskies into a photo opportunity to demonstrate his green aspirations. But he, or his advisers, clearly thought there was electoral mileage in being seen to be reaching out to the Shahidas and Abdullahs of our country. It could, however calculatingly, be a vote-winner.

Just imagine a politician of the right – or even the centre-left – showing anything like that empathy or humanity today towards what we now call “the other”. These days we are more conditioned to being lectured on how multiculturalism has failed. Politicians compete to create ever more hostile environments for those who dare to imagine a life like that of the Rehmans.

We have, in other words, travelled a long way in 17 years.

One of those who appears to understand what has been going on is the vice-presidential Democratic candidate, Governor Tim Walz. In a fascinating interview with New York Times journalist Ezra Klein, he recently spoke of the dangers inherent in Donald Trump’s masterful ability to stir up hatred between communities and strip away the “thin veil of society” that holds us together.

“We’re very tribal by nature,” Walz told Klein. “We go to those who look like us and sound like us … because, otherwise, you’re competing for my food source. And we regress back, you know, 20,000 years … So I think that you cannot make someone ‘the other.’ You cannot, because … it becomes dehumanising.”

We’ve seen a lot of dehumanising in Britain in the past two weeks with people who should have known better, and who cared little for the truth, seeking to exploit tragic and horrific killings by whipping up division and hatred against “the other”.

Twitter/X was barely a year old when Cameron embarked on his journey to Balsall Heath. It’s been grotesque to see how that platform has been used these past few days to polarise communities, amplify ignorance, distribute lies and incite violence. All with the nonchalant indifference of the richest man on the planet, who, of course, wants the biggest liar and crook in presidential history to be re-elected.

Thursday’s Times reported analysis showing that Tommy Robinson – invited back onto X by Musk after being banned by the platform’s previous owners – is reaching a daily audience of 50 million.

It’s good business for Musk. The Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates that just 10 of the extremist accounts reinstated by Musk – including Andrew Tate and Andrew Anglin, a US neo-Nazi – generated up to $19m in advertising revenue through 2.5 billion tweet impressions.

This may explain why Musk this week launched a legal action against advertisers who have jointly decided they no longer want their brands to be associated with the kind of poison Musk is apparently only too happy to see spreading across his platform.

“We tried peace for two years,” he tweeted. “Now it’s war.”

When asked about this boycott in December last year his response to squeamish advertisers was a remarkably blunt three words: “Go f*** yourself.”  The interviewer was so stunned that Musk repeated it, even louder and more deliberately. His own lovable twist on how to win friends and influence people.

Regulation has, to date at least, not done much to curb Musk’s enthusiasm for amplifying lies and hatred on his platform. He’s an arsonist with a huge box of matches – and he’s having too much fun.

But advertisers have an immediate power that sluggish regulators lack: in the first six months of Musk’s ownership of X, revenues fell by nearly 40 per cent.

In July 2011, the News of the World was forced out of business after Rupert Murdoch took fright at an advertiser boycott: the paper had become a poisonous brand in the wake of the revelations that its reporters had hacked the phone of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

British advertisers will make their own decisions about whether they want to be associated with X after contemplating its toxic role in the ugly – and obviously coordinated – disturbances and riots of the past fortnight.

It’s his platform and he’s made his choices about the public space he hosts. No amount of legal suits or sweary insults will persuade companies to pay him to be in that space if they don’t want to.

The respected Financial Times columnist Edward Luce tweeted this week: “Can’t say this enough; Elon Musk’s menace to democracy is intolerable. He’s using the largest & most influential platform in the democratic world to stoke racial conflict and civil breakdown – in his own posts & what X promotes. Democracies can no longer ignore this.”

Musk was stung into replying, with an attack on the “tripe” published in the FT and labelling Luce as one of the “legacy media dingbats who lied repeatedly”.

But Luce is right. This is a problem that can no longer be ignored. We may not be able to imagine a leading politician acting with the – albeit short-lived – empathy and curiosity of David Cameron, but we can fight to insist on some basic boundaries in digital spaces.

We can’t say we haven’t been warned.

Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of The Guardian, is editor of Prospect magazine