Britain’s post-truth politics Elon Musk has debased the public discourse

“I know something you don’t know” is one of the most elementally effective sentences in our language. It’s a blatant hook for attention, so instantly powerful that even small children set it to a taunting little tune and dangle it in front of each other in the playground. We’re hard-wired by evolution to seek out gossip and rumour, to thrill to the disclosure of a secret, and to strengthen bonds by trading confidences. From the mead hall to the boardroom, early access to useful information has long been the key to success and even — in dangerous times — to survival.

Secrets, lies and half-truths, too, have always been part of government, and under discussion in the press. This was true even in the postwar years where there was a relatively greater culture of public deference towards politicians. It was, after all, the legendary 20th-century Times journalist Louis Heren who wrote: “When a politician tells you something in confidence, always ask yourself ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’” Yet the act of exposing a politician for lying had its own rules of engagement. The traditional avenue for an allegation was generally via the British press and broadcast media, which exposed it to editorial scrutiny, the attention of lawyers and a significant degree of financial and reputational risk for the accuser. It could even lead to a judicial or public inquiry.

The operations of the British “legacy media” have of course not been an unbroken chain of good behaviour, but there has nonetheless been some framework of accountability. Regulatory bodies such as the Press Complaints Commission and, after 2014, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) rein in press operations, along with libel laws and, when necessary, the police and criminal courts. A number of British tabloid journalists went to jail over the phone-hacking scandal. As a last resort, the public could boycott a publication, and inflict lasting commercial pain: Liverpudlians were so incensed by The Sun’s front-page coverage of the Hillsborough tragedy — a splash egregiously entitled “The Truth” which wrongly blamed fans for the disaster in which 97 people died — that sales in Merseyside remain very low even today.

Yet online, this system for restraining or punishing the most extreme false allegations has now been sharply eroded. The overheating, unchecked rhetoric of rumour and smear is a swelling presence in modern British politics, and there is every likelihood of it intensifying. In recent months, much of it has been directed personally at Keir Starmer, and already it has begun to warp and destabilise British democracy itself.

Some of the elements in this contemporary collapse were introduced decades ago. The rise of celebrity culture in the Nineties and Noughties, along with a plethora of magazines that detailed every supermarket trip and gym visit of a cast of briefly famous characters, attuned the public to a heightened churn of gossip. When newspapers entered the game, most notably with MailOnline’s “Sidebar of Shame”, the primary focus remained on figures from the entertainment industry — but the appetite for gorging on fast-moving trivia had been created.

The advent of social media in the early 2010s then further accelerated the circulation of both hearsay and personal vituperation. This time, self-righteous fury entered the equation. For a period, X became the chief conduit for the policing of acceptable speech, with perceived transgressors singled out as objects of outrage by a “progressive” online mob. The effect could be personally devastating: in one early Twitter storm, in 2015, hysteria was unleashed upon the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Sir Tim Hunt for making some silly passing remarks — which he meant to be humorous — about women in science labs. During that same speech, he had also actively exhorted women to enter science as a career. He was nonetheless asked to resign from his role at University College London, as well as several other research positions. A growing nervousness spread throughout institutions, particularly academia and publishing, that any digression from a progressive-approved line on issues such as sexism, racism or trans rights could be career-threatening.

Then came the 2016 Brexit vote, which sparked a series of political crises that made normal, day-to-day governance extremely difficult. The survivor of Conservative Party dramas emerged as Boris Johnson, perhaps the first prime minister to envision politics — as he had journalism — primarily as a form of entertainment. He kept the British public supplied with an excess of narrative and a paucity of workable policy. Truth and public trust were casualties of his premiership: the “Partygate” revelations appeared to confirm that there was one rule for the political classes and quite another for ordinary citizens. Louis Heren’s maxim had rarely seemed so apposite.

This was the state of the nation when Elon Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, in October 2022. The prospect of libel payments didn’t daunt him: by December 2024, he was the first person in the world to have attained an estimated net worth of over $400 billion. From a technical rather than a media background, he had long demonstrated no awareness of any responsibility to restrain his speech or accusations, either on the grounds of accuracy or civic responsibility. Confronted with anyone who offended his mercurial sensibility, his instinct was to trash-talk, escalate and inflame. He had already emerged unscathed after one defamation case in 2019, in which he dubbed Vernon Unsworth, a cave diver who bluntly dismissed Musk’s intervention in a cave rescue plan, “pedo guy”. Unsworth, not surprisingly, sued. But he lost: Musk had accepted that the slur was baseless, but managed to convince the US jury that in South Africa, where he grew up, “pedo guy” was just a regular insult without specific connotations. Unsworth’s lawyer said afterwards that the verdict had sent a signal “that you can make any accusation you want to, as vile as it may be and as untrue as it may be, and somebody can get away with it”. The observation was prophetic.

Since securing his close alliance with Donald Trump — and the apparent licence to do exactly what he wants — Musk has heightened his explicitly political interference in the governance of other countries. In Britain at least, he inherited a user base that was already receptive to gossip, accustomed to intemperate expressions of online rage, and with a post-Covid, post-Johnson collapse of trust in politicians. Musk took things further. By ceasing moderation on X, he has permitted a constant wash of unverified rumour to ebb and flow over Labour politicians, leaving a stain behind even as it recedes. In the aftermath of the horrific Southport killings, the rumour mill began working overtime among Right-wing accounts, grinding “I know something you don’t know” in numerous different styles. In response to some of the false accusations about the killer which helped to trigger riots in the streets and attacks on police officers and mosques, Musk posted: “Civil war is inevitable.” Reform UK leader Nigel Farage went so far as to speculate in a video that “the truth is being withheld from us”.

In early January this year, Musk began vociferously tweeting about what he called “the Pakistani-ancestry grooming gangs” scandal in Rotherham, Rochdale and other towns, which stretched from the late Eighties until 2013. His tweets on the topic were mixed up with expressions of support for Reform UK and far-Right activist Tommy Robinson, who is currently in prison for contempt of court. On 3 January, Musk posted: “Starmer was responsible for the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years. Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.” This wild statement was not only wholly unfounded, but a brazen inversion of the actual truth. While many in authority do bear culpability, most notably the local police and councils, those most closely involved in the story say that Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions, was instrumental in bringing the perpetrators to justice. Andrew Norfolk, the former Times reporter who spent years exposing the crimes, said: “I want to put the record straight on this. It was Starmer who changed the rules to make more prosecutions possible. That happened and there was a huge increase in convictions.”

At this point, one might reasonably have expected British politicians of all parties to unite in some kind of staunch defence of actual evidence and objective truth. Chillingly, that did not happen. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, in tandem with Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, has developed a habit of using Musk’s lines of argument as political ammunition. Not only did she taunt Starmer in the Commons with a petition — boosted by Musk — calling for the Prime Minister to resign, but she and Jenrick both fed the X-based rumour factory by publicly hinting that there were important facts the public was not being told concerning the Southport case.

Those British politicians who are tempted to hitch a ride on Musk’s bandwagon, rather than defend the honest ground of political opposition, might heed the warnings from history. In the early days of the French Revolution, for example, a sudden explosion in newspaper titles and a collapse in regulation created a febrile, sparring press that might almost be seen as an early prototype of X. Between July and December 1789 alone, a total of 250 newspapers sprang up for public consumption, each vigorously competing in the battle for attention. While many were vehicles for astute debate and analysis, they also became mouthpieces for various factions, promoting denunciations against political rivals. Sometimes, claims carried a measure of truth; often, they didn’t. The thickening atmosphere of violence and suspicion began to exert its own dynamic force upon society.

Smears were used as a way of hobbling troublesome rivals. The radical newspaper editor Jean-Paul Marat helped to finish off the career of firebrand activist priest Jacques Roux by falsely alleging that he was a “venal intriguer” whose real name was the Abbé Renaudi. The lawyer and journalist Camille Desmoulins destroyed the reputation of a former friend, Jacques Pierre Brissot, in a scathing pamphlet called “Brissot Unmasked”. When he saw Brissot later being sentenced to death, he reportedly cried in remorse: “My god, I’m sorry for this!” When Maximilien Robespierre backed the Law of 22 Prairial in June 1794, rumour and accusation became the only things needed to secure a conviction, since the suspect’s right to a defence had been discarded. Most of the newspapers which had fed debate had been shut down and silenced, one by one. Marat, Roux, Brissot and Desmoulins were all dead.

The separation of accusation from verifiable evidence, or from any potential restraints upon the accuser, is a dangerous game that rarely ends well. It is even more disturbing when regularly practised by the US President’s right-hand man. To play along with it for temporary political advantage — helping to dissolve the very principles that have reliably underpinned the British parliamentary and justice system — is to play with fire. The rise of rumour is closely related to the collapse of objective truth, and the slide of political systems from rational persuasion of the electorate to a feverish struggle for domination. Musk’s revolution, one way or another, will devour its children.

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