«Elon Musk represents enormous power. Except that until now this power was outside governments and parliamentary halls. Now, with Musk preparing to have an institutional and government role, this power is taking a step forward. Will he bring what is the extra-parliamentary way of doing things, so to speak, into the institutions or will he seek mediation and adapt? This is the great unknown that I don’t know the answer to. We will only find out by living, to quote Battisti.”
It’s the comment of Marco Lombardi, professor of Sociology, Communication and Crisis Management atCatholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milanon the figure of Elon Musk and the X case (the former Twitter) abandoned by many users to protest against the American billionaire, considered the architect of the platform’s shift to the right, given the current lack of moderation of violent, racist content, which promotes fake news, conspiracy theories and incites hatred.
Among the illustrious abandonments is that of the Briton Guardian, communicated a few hours after the announcement that Musk will be part of Donald Trump’s next government, with a mandate to cut spending at federal agencies. His companies have hundreds of contracts with the US government and Musk has long been calling for a sharp reduction in constraints imposed for environmental protection, telecommunications and transportation. This is also why Musk spent hundreds of millions of dollars to support the tycoon during the US presidential election campaign.
«There are around 120 thousand users who have abandoned Guardian and some academics. If we sum it up, all those who are leaving X are the same ones who supported Kamala Harris who was soundly defeated by Donald Trump in the last American presidential elections. I would quip that if the success of these people’s anti-Musk and anti-X campaign is equal to their success in supporting Harris, we can expect an increase in users of Musk’s platform in the near future”, says Lombardi who coordinates ITSTIME (Italian Team for Security Terroristic Issues & Managing Emergencies), a research center of the Department of Sociology which has been studying the phenomenon of terrorism for fifteen years by monitoring communication and producing analyses.
For Lombardi, the interesting data concerns the reasons why they leave X: «The criticism of the platform is that it is toxic, a dispenser of fake news, a limiter of freedom. Now, if I remember correctly, one of the criticisms that were made of Twitter before Musk’s arrival was to have a platform that was too libertarian, that is, without moderation, without censorship, giving freedom to all opinions, whether right or wrong.. The toxicity before Musk was that it was a platform that didn’t control anything and left everyone too free to say what they wanted. In short, toxicity has many faces, and also lies in the absence of control. Now, criticism of this toxicity exploded after Kamala Harris’ defeat in the elections, as if those who abandoned her cannot bear to hear something said that is contrary to their thoughts and political correctness.”
Lombardi recalls Musk’s attack on Italian judges on the migrant issue and says that this represents «a big question mark. It was an improvident exit to which this character has accustomed us, perhaps because he has not yet realized that by taking on a public office, all the things you say, if before they were personal excesses, now become political comments which have a formal effect on relations between countries. It is clear that one can make criticisms but it is equally clear that the role that each person assumes limits their freedoms. Maybe Musk didn’t realize this. Until now he had no role to respect. It was he who defined the role of himself. However, he now finds himself within a government where formal roles must be respected. And this is a bit of a risk for the entire American administration that we will find ourselves facing where there are two figures like Trump and Musk as leaders. Both will be able to amaze us with the disruptive, immediate and personal initiatives they will be able to take. We will see how much they will be tempered by awareness strategies, of being within a system, the international one, which has precise rules to respect and is based on a system of checks and balances”.
