Good morning. Later today, Donald Trump will be interviewed by the tech billionaire and owner of X, Elon Musk. It is unlikely to be a particularly searching examination of the former president’s ideas. Musk’s promise: “Entertainment guaranteed!”
By now, the fact that the man who runs one of the most influential social media platforms in the world has no compunction about using it to spread his worldview is well established. Events of the last week have only confirmed it: as a series of far-right riots convulsed the UK – that were to a significant extent fomented on X – Musk’s response was to say that “civil war is inevitable”, describe prosecutors as the “woke stasi”, and spread misinformation himself.
Despite the virulence and persistence of Musk’s highly politicised interventions, he has so far been more or less impervious to government regulation – in the UK or in most of the other places X operates. Today’s newsletter, with the Guardian’s global technology editor Dan Milmo, is about how Musk is using his platform to shape a febrile political era, and whether anything can be done to stop him. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
UK riots | The archbishop of Canterbury has criticised the use of Christian imagery in this summer’s riots as “an offence to our faith”. Writing in the Guardian, Justin Welby condemned the violent unrest, which he described as “racist”, “anti-Muslim, anti-refugee and anti-asylum seeker”.
Southport attack | Hundreds of mourners joined the parents of Alice da Silva Aguiar, one of the victims of the Southport knife attack, at her funeral. Serena Kennedy, chief constable of Merseyside police, told the congregation that Alice’s parents had asked her to say that they “do not want any more violence on the streets of the United Kingdom” in their daughter’s name.
Paris 2024 | Paris closed the Olympic Games with a stunt-filled final ceremony that included Tom Cruise abseiling into the Stade de France to mark the transition to Los Angeles 2028. Tony Estanguet, head of the organising committee for Paris 2024, said that a nation of “diehard moaners” had found itself unable to stop singing.
Ukraine | Ukrainian sources have indicated that thousands of troops have been committed to its incursion into Russia, which on its sixth day appeared to edge forward with reports of fighting 15 to 18 miles inside the border. Kyiv caught Russia off-guard by striking in an area had seen no significant fighting since the spring of 2022.
Banksy | A central London glass police box has been made to look like a tank of piranhas, in the seventh in a series of works by the graffiti artist Banksy. The elusive artist claimed the work as his own by featuring it on his Instagram account in a post at 1pm on Sunday.
In depth: ‘Musk didn’t create Trump’s resurgence – but he’s certainly amplified it’
“I love Elon Musk,” Donald Trump said last month. “We have to make life good for us smart people. And he’s as smart as you get.”
He took a different view in 2022, when Musk suggested that Trump should “sail into the sunset” and backed Ron DeSantis for the Republican nomination for president. Trump called the X owner a “bullshit artist”. Since then, though, relations have warmed considerably.
While Musk has denied reports that he will give $45m a month to a Trump-supporting Super Pac, he acknowledged launching one of the arms-length political organisations in support of Trump without saying how much he would give. Meanwhile, quite apart from reinstating him to the platform in 2022, he promotes Trump through his personal feed and is thought to have played a key role in persuading the former president that he should pick JD Vance, a darling of rightwing tech entrepreneurs, as his running mate. (How’s that going?)
That is the context for his interview today. “Clearly Musk didn’t create Trump’s resurgence,” Dan Milmo said. “But he’s certainly amplified and reflected it in a way that no other big tech leader would.”
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How much influence does he have in the US?
Musk said soon after he bought Twitter that “to deserve public trust,” it must be “politically neutral”. Many are unconvinced that he has stuck to that approach in the US or anywhere else. “He’s weaponised it in two ways,” Dan said. “Through his own presence, and through changes helping prominent far-right accounts via a lax approach to moderation.”
Since taking over, Musk has fired half of X’s election integrity team, disbanded its trust and safety council, and changed the way the “blue tick” system operates to mean that anyone can pay for the promotion it now provides – a tool much more commonly used by those on the right. There is little visibility on whether X’s algorithm has been tweaked to promote right-leaning voices, but many observers say that their own feeds suggest it may have been.
And while he is supposedly driven by an iron commitment to free speech, that has not been consistently applied: the “White Dudes for Harris” account, for example, was recently briefly suspended and then labelled as spam.
Even just by dint of his own 192 million followers (who see a lot of his posts after he reportedly directed engineers to amplify his output), Musk has considerable personal weight on his platform. The Center for Countering Digital Hate produced an analysis last week saying that false or misleading claims he has posted about the US election have been viewed almost 1.2bn times – and appear to be excluded from X’s “community notes” factchecking system.
“All of this has been controversial,” Dan said. “It’s important to understand that X is not a mass media market – but it’s where people go when big news breaks, and it is a place that can trigger a debate among influential people that washes out to everybody else.”
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What about the UK?
Musk has shown no sign of deferring to the norms of other countries where his absolutist theory of free speech might find less support than in the US. “He made the decision to reinstate Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate,” Dan pointed out, both figures who were banned in the past.
“You’ve seen the direct effects of that in their influence over the past couple of weeks. And his own interventions since the Southport attack have certainly been the most provocative he’s ever made in the UK. Before Musk arrived, I’m pretty confident that a lot of the most incendiary content would have been taken down. But they don’t do that sort of moderation any more.”
As well as entering a war of words with Keir Starmer and personally promoting accounts that dubiously claim the danger of the rioters has been overstated while Muslim troublemakers go unpunished, he has reportedly ignored requests from the government’s disinformation unit to take down posts that it believes are inciting violence.
He also shared a post from the co-leader of the far-right Britain First party featuring a fake Daily Telegraph story claiming that Keir Starmer is considering building “detainment camps” on the Falkland Islands. That was viewed close to 2m times before it was removed without acknowledgment.
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Is he pursuing a similar approach elsewhere?
Musk’s appetite for confrontation with the Labour government is similar to previous confrontations with centre-left administrations around the world – like in Australia, where he successfully challenged a ruling barring a video of a bishop being stabbed in a Sydney church not just within Australia, but around the world, because there was no way to stop Australian users using a VPN to access it. Other major social media firms complied; Australia’s eSafety commissioner said she had been the subject of death threats as a result of the row.
Meanwhile, Musk is battling with the EU, which filed charges against X last month under the digital services act for ignoring European law and allowing disinformation and illegal hate speech on the platform.
At the same time, he has formed friendly relationships with populist rightwing leaders from Italy’s Giorgia Meloni to Argentina’s Javier Milei and former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. The common denominator is that he appears much more minded to give politicians a hearing when they are sympathetic to his underlying worldview.
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Can anything be done to curb his behaviour?
If the EU succeeds in its case, it will be able to levy significant fines and enforce changes if X wishes to maintain access to users in Europe. In the UK, meanwhile, there are questions over whether the new Online Safety Act will be sufficient to oblige Musk to make changes. On Friday, Sadiq Khan and Starmer suggested the legislation was not fit for purpose. And last week, technology secretary Peter Kyle told the Times: “The relationship we have with some of these companies is much more akin to the negotiations with fellow secretaries of state in other countries, simply because of the scale and scope that they have.”
British MPs have said they want to call on Musk to appear before the science, innovation and technology committee to be questioned over X’s role in fomenting the recent far-right riots, as well as his own comments. He is highly unlikely to show up for such a session.
On criminal charges for those inciting violence on social media, the Online Safety Act “largely puts existing tools that are available into one place,” Dan said. “It will do its job on that in the way its antecedents are doing their job.”
But on the civil aspects of the bill which could enforce fines on companies like X, the prospects are much less clear, he said. “The bill basically tells social media firms to enforce their terms and conditions properly. Those bits are going to take until beyond the end of the year to be implemented. So we don’t know how effectively it will work.”
Even if hefty fines are the consequence, he added, “Musk’s quite staggering wealth suggests that he can cover any losses for a very long time. And given what we know about how he sees the political and social impact of how he operates, it wouldn’t be surprising if he accepts that cost.”
What else we’ve been reading
As Sven-Göran Eriksson contends with a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, he speaks to Simon Hattenstone for Saturday magazine about his remarkable life – the England job, the tabloid press, and his newfound appreciation of family. Football is still an inescapable obsession. “Yes, obsession,” he says. “Yes, it’s a drug. In the Euros I saw every game.” Archie
ICYMI: The Hollywood Reporter is entertaining on the schism between tech bros and the Hollywood elite that has caught fire during the US presidential campaign: are we ready for Disney v PayPal for the fate of the western world. Toby Moses, head of newsletters
Zoe Williams interviews Nazir Afzal, former chief prosecutor for northwest England, about riots, racism and the far right. “It’s what I remember from the 60s and 70s,” he says. “It’s what my children don’t remember because they’ve never seen it, but they’re feeling it now. I’m glad my parents aren’t alive to see this.” Archie
Nell Frizzell writes movingly about welcoming refugees into her home: “The fact that our son’s socks were on the floor by a pile of his books? Fine … Because the alternative, for everyone we have hosted, is worse.” Toby
Eva Wiseman is good on the anxiety that attends a moment of unfamiliar hope, in the news – from US politics to the response to the far right in the UK – and in her own life. As she says: “Hope isn’t just the simple drag of a dog to a possible treat, but also a kind of work, a kind of struggle.” Archie
Sport
Paris 2024 | After more than two weeks of frenetic competition across 32 sports involving more than 10,000 athletes, the US finished the Paris Olympics top of the medal table once again. Team GB secured podium finishes in cycling and weightlifting on Sunday but finished seventh on the count of gold medals, their lowest finish since 2004 but with the third most medals overall.
Cricket | The England captain, Ben Stokes, had to be helped from the field after sustaining an injury playing for Northern Superchargers in the Hundred and is a serious doubt for the Test series against Sri Lanka. Stokes appeared to clutch his left hamstring as he ran a quick single during the Superchargers’ innings.
Football | Wayne Rooney had a difficult start to life as manager of Plymouth, with his side being beaten 4-0 by Sheffield Wednesday in the first game of the Championship season.
The front pages
The Guardian has “Far-right use of Christian symbols an ‘offence to our faith’ says Welby”, an exclusive from the Archbishop condemning ‘racist and anti-Muslim’ rioters. The riots still occupy many of the front pages: the i has “Hopes that worst of riots ‘at an end’”, while in the Telegraph it’s “Cooper: UK has lost respect for police” covering comments from the Home Secretary.
Other front pages focus on the funeral of Southport victim Alice da Silva Aguiar. The Daily Mail has “No more rioting in the name of our little girl”, in a message from the parents. In the Mirror, “Mummy and Daddy will always, always love you”.
The Times has, “Knockdown prices for green belt to build on”. The paper says councils will be able to buy green belt land cheaply for housing. In the Financial Times it’s the US election with “Harris leads Trump on economy in poll that marks sharp sentiment shift”. And in the Express, it’s “Exposed! Junior doctors’ plot to cripple NHS again” as the paper says there are plans for more strikes.
Several of the papers also picture the Paris 2024 closing ceremony, with Tom Cruise’s abseiling arrival into the stadium featuring prominently.
Today in Focus
The two-child welfare limit: why won’t Labour scrap the cap?
Tom Clark and Janet Arinaitwe on the politics behind the two-child welfare cap and the impact it has on some of Britain’s poorest families
Cartoon of the day | Edith Pritchett
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The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
The Olympic Games are always full of heartwarming stories of triumph over adversity, gold snatched from the jaws of defeat and glorious British failure. Michael Hogan looked back at the Paris Games as they drew to a close for some of the TV highlights. Whether it be the effortless cool of world record-breaking Mondo Duplantis in the pole vault, whipping out a meme-worthy pose to celebrate, or Kellie Harrington’s impromptu singalong after her boxing victory, there’s been no shortage of moments to remember. Although, whether Anthony Ammirati will be pleased about what turns up when you now Google his name is anyone’s guess. The French vaulter knocked the bar off with his groin at 5.7m, and it’s made him more famous than a bronze medal ever could have.
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
