Elon Musk, a close Trump-ally who happens to be the world’s richest man, has turned a social-media platform he purchased into a de facto broadcast outlet.Brian Snyder/Reuters
It sounded like another of those cultural policies that get bundled into trade agreements alongside the important economic stuff: Canada’s “digital safety.” During the now-suspended U.S.-Canada trade talks, the American team called their opposition to it “digital trade alignment;” Ottawa bundled it under the catch-all heading of “digital sovereignty,” and seemed prepared to bargain it away if the terms were right.
In normal times, many of us would have been glad to see digital safety bargained away. Proposed laws to regulate the content of social media and streaming services, such as the “Safe Social Media Act” (C-34) currently before Parliament, sound censorious and nannyish, and far removed from trade and commerce.
But that ignores the extraordinary developments in Silicon Valley that have made these far from normal times.
Tech experts worry that Canada could concede on digital sovereignty in trade talks
A current book, the entertainingly titled The Nerd Reich by Gil Durán, documents the path that led a circle of tech billionaires, otherwise lacking in general education or worldly knowledge, to be influenced by a few fringe books and over-caffeinated gatherings to become believers in, or at least very tolerant of, white supremacy, eugenics, and related beliefs that tend to be hallmarks of fascism.
Outside the United States, these powerful elites’ taste for racial-warfare ideology is having an effect we should find familiar.
A century ago, an automobile executive who happened to be the world’s wealthiest man spent some of his money on a newspaper whose front-page headline on many weeks read “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem” and devoted years of issues to theories involving Jewish figures plotting to weaken the white race with immigration “invasions.” This was a worry because Henry Ford used his nationwide network of car dealerships to give The Dearborn Independent a peak circulation of almost 900,000 readers in the 1920s; every new Model T contained a copy. Ford of Canada enthusiastically distributed its owner’s hate speech, so Mr. Ford’s ideological export had a distinct impact north of the border and quite likely contributed to the explosions of racial violence and intolerance Canada experienced during that decade.
Decades after those “theories” faded into ignominy following a war against a German regime that had promoted them and put them into practice, an automobile executive who happens to be the world’s richest man has turned a social-media platform he purchased into a de facto broadcast outlet for exactly those ideas. And he has persuaded owners of other platforms to allow those ideas to circulate on their most popular channels and feeds, and the U.S. government to do nothing about it.
Opinion: Elon Musk uses his tech to foment violence and extremism. We could be next
If you had been a casual consumer of Spotify, X and YouTube during a three-month period at this time last year – say, a young person who follows and subscribes only to those channels and feeds and commentary podcasts that are most often recommended to new users – you would have learned the following:
On the second most popular podcast on Spotify and one of the top ones on YouTube, you’d have learned from Nick Fuentes that “organized Jewry” are the problem in politics and that prominent Jewish figures are disloyal and unpatriotic, claims presented as fact without rebuttal. You would have repeatedly learned of Henry Ford’s theory that Jews are conspiring to dilute the white population with immigrants, presented as the “Kalergi Plan” or the “Great Replacement,” which appeared at least 477,000 times last year on X and has been explicitly championed by the platform’s owner. You would have heard much about “remigration,” the deportation of fellow citizens who are members of racial or religious minorities, which was mentioned 71,000 times during one week last September alone on X, mostly without criticism, by top-ranked accounts including Elon Musk himself, who went on to declare that racial “traitors” must be “dealt with” before “invaders.” You would have learned that groups can possess IQ, and that some nationalities and skin colours carry a lower IQ – a long-discredited impossibility that nevertheless has flourished on top-rated social media and podcasts. You would have heard “white genocide,” a fictitious idea that portrays non-white residents of various countries as exterminators, discussed as a fact multiple times, including repeatedly by Mr. Musk, whose race-baiting posts are pushed into the feeds of the platform’s 338 million active monthly users, including at least 11 million Canadians.
For many consumers who otherwise don’t read much, this is the only education they have received on these subjects, and they are given little reason to question it. And this, not coincidentally, is occurring during a moment when acts of anti-Jewish hate and racial intolerance in Canada are reaching alarming highs.
I’m not convinced that proof-of-age laws or censorious regulatory measures are an effective way to deal with the problem. But I am convinced that this is not a time to take any tools off the table in exchange for market access.