While, at the time of writing, Belgium and France still have to form their governments – a quest complicated by the desire to exclude far-right parties that have gained ground at the ballot box – some of their neighbours have taken the plunge, welcoming radical right-wing formations into their executive.
“Finland, Italy and Slovakia have been joined by two other EU countries whose governments feature extremist parties which had been ostracised up until recently,” notes Petr Jedlička in Deník Referendum. In Croatia, “this is the third government in a row led by the traditional nationalist but pro-Western right-wing party HDZ”, with the Patriotic Movement (MP, far-right) entering for the first time.”
In the Netherlands, it took no less than 223 days for the government led by former intelligence chief Dick Schoofs to come into being on 2 July. Although he has no political affiliation, he leads the most right-wing government in the country’s recent history, notes Politico. The early days of the Schoofs government were marked by tensions between the coalition parties, writes Dieuwertje Kuipers in Vrij Nederland, not least because of the jabs and criticisms levelled by Geert Wilders at his partners, and their unease at his more outrageous statements. Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) came out on top in the 2023 parliamentary elections.
Taking advantage of the freedom afforded by his “simple” mandate as a member of parliament, Wilders gives the unpleasant impression of keeping permanent watch on Schoofs, along with his audience on X (formerly Twitter), and of wanting to impose his views on the entire coalition. No wonder, Kuipers observes, that “many voters expect the government to fall prematurely due to differences of opinion”.
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It’s probably no coincidence that Wilders has chosen the most divisive social network to prod the government: since its takeover by American-South African magnate Elon Musk two years ago, the first truly global agora has been transformed into an arena where hate speech, conspiracy theories and far-right bots proliferate. “X was once touted as being a “global town square” where journalists, politicians and interested citizens could congregate for public debate. But given the number of journalists, academics and left-leaning users who have left, it seems unlikely it will ever return to this,” laments Katherine M. FitzGerald in The Conversation.
In the name of unfettered freedom of expression, the owner of Tesla and SpaceX has in fact readmitted or promoted personalities who had been banned by the previous management, and has no hesitation in violating the platform’s rules of use by sharing false information and deepfakes – videos created by artificial intelligence featuring real personalities. When the richest man in the world seizes the world’s largest digital megaphone, the consequences cannot be confined to freedom of expression alone.
We saw this once again this summer, with the anti-immigrant riots that broke out in several UK cities after rumours circulated that the man who stabbed three children dead in a dance class in Southport (north-west England) was a Muslim asylum seeker (the alleged perpetrator is a British national born of Rwandan parents). The riots were amplified by “influencers” close to the radical right, such as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (better known as Tommy Robinson) and Andrew Tate.
Both of these men were unbanned by Musk, who has added his own fuel to the fire by expertly asserting that “civil war is inevitable” in the UK. This has led Alan Rusbridger to label Musk an “arsonist with a huge box of matches”, in the British daily The Independent. In his own magazine, the Prospect editor discusses “the way Twitter/X is being run – or not run” and “the way the platform is being used to stir up hatred, if not actually violence; and—perhaps even more importantly—to erode any sense that some things may be verifiably true, and others not.” Rusbridger cites American writer Jonathan Rauch’s essay The Constitution of Knowledge (Brookings Institution Press, 2021), in which Rauch “lists the four fields whose endeavours enable us—most of us, just—to live in a reality-based community: science and academia; journalism; the law and government”.
Yet, notes Rusbridger, “In order to escape from that reality, you begin by attacking scientists, lawyers, journalists and the “swamp”, or “blob”, of government. And then you go further. […] It took centuries of conscious work to build the constitution of knowledge to, as Rauch puts it, ‘save us from ourselves.’ Untrammelled social media is doing the opposite and leading to a world in which, as numerous surveys show, we increasingly don’t know who, or what, to believe.”
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“This summer we have witnessed something new and unprecedented,” notes Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian: ”The billionaire owner of a tech platform publicly confronting an elected leader and using his platform to undermine his authority and incite violence. Britain’s 2024 summer riots were Elon Musk’s trial balloon” for the US presidential election in November. “He got away with it,” adds the specialist in the far right and social networks, ”And if you’re not terrified by both the extraordinary supranational power of that and the potential consequences, you should be.”
All the more so as these platforms seem to be increasingly free of rules and safeguards, while continuing to advocate self-regulation: “Twitter, now X, has sacked at least half its trust and safety team. But then so has every tech company we know about. Thousands of workers previously employed to sniff out misinformation have been laid off by Meta, TikTok, Snap and Discord. Just last week, Facebook killed off one of its last remaining transparency tools, CrowdTangle.”
Last month, the European Commissioner for Internal Market, Thierry Breton, sent a letter to Elon Musk reminding him that, as the head of X, he had a legal obligation to prevent “the amplification of harmful content” under European law. The richest man on the planet responded with a meme whose tone illustrates his concept of freedom of expression and his vision of the global agora. How encouraging.
If X seems to serve the interests of the extreme right, Telegram appears to be more politically neutral, but no less toxic. Recently arrested in Paris, co-founder Pavel Durov has, as far as we know, always refused to intervene in the promotion or blocking of accounts hosted on his messaging service. While Telegram has provided an alternative to the internet in countries where press freedom is under attack from the authorities, starting with Russia, it is just as popular with all sorts of pro-Kremlin agents.
“The unmediated mix of users, including two armies at war, reflects precisely Durov’s idea of freedom of expression,” observe Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan in CEPA: ”Everyone can have a say on social media, and there shouldn’t be any kind of control from any government. […] His quasi-anarchic attitude seems to echo the ideology of the early hacker movement of the 1980s, but it isn’t a sustainable strategy today, when governments around the world are on the offensive against the free-for-all approach online.”
“Is government coercion the only way to enforce the rules?” ask Soldatov and Borogan, who provide the beginnings of an answer: ”Social media are an essential part of our societal fabric, and our society, through non-government organisations, or parliaments, and parliamentary hearings, are perfectly capable of creating mechanisms of control that do not include the arrests of CEOs for the lack of moderation.”