Exclusive: MPs leaving platform or scaling back use over its ‘deterioration’ under Elon Musk’s ownership

Labour MPs have begun quitting X in alarm over the platform, with one saying Elon Musk had turned it into “a megaphone for foreign adversaries and far-right fringe groups”.

Over the weekend, newly elected MPs took to WhatsApp groups to raise growing concerns about the role X played in the spread of misinformation amid the far-right-led riots in parts of England and Northern Ireland.

Two Labour MPs are known to have told colleagues they were leaving the platform. One of them, Noah Law, has disabled his account. Other MPs who still use X have begun examining alternatives, including Threads, which is owned by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and the open-source platform Bluesky.

In an article for the Guardian on Monday, a former Twitter executive, Bruce Daisley, said Musk should face personal sanctions and even an arrest warrant if he continues to stir up public disorder online.

  • @tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    4•4 months ago

    Yeah, I can’t really agree with the Brits on this one.

    I think that what might happen in the long term is that different countries wind up with at least semi-separate social media platforms. Trying to create a least common denominator that everyone can live with just runs into too many problems.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet

    The splinternet (also referred to as cyber-balkanization or internet balkanization) is a characterization of the Internet as splintering and dividing due to various factors, such as technology, commerce, politics, nationalism, religion, and divergent national interests. “Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it”, wrote the Economist weekly in 2010, arguing it could soon splinter along geographic and commercial boundaries. The Chinese government erected the “Great Firewall” for political reasons, and Russia has enacted the Sovereign Internet Law that allows it to partition itself from the rest of the Internet. Other nations, such as the US and Australia, have discussed plans to create a similar firewall to block child pornography or weapon-making instructions.

    I mean, I’m not going to have the British government censoring what I can see on political grounds. No way. And I’m sure that there are Brits who are appalled at seeing politically-extreme material that’s constitutionally-protected in the US showing up in front of their eyeballs.

    And this is just the UK. Like, they’re maybe censorious by our standards, but it’s not even getting into stuff like Islamic countries and blasphemy law or Russia wanting state control over media because they don’t like criticism of the government.

    Like, the best you might get is a common platform but with not everyone having the same view of the content on it, with some people having content censored in various ways, kind of like you get on the Threadiverse with defederations. Like, the government gets a kill switch over particular content on the view that their citizens have of information, but cannot disrupt communication between people outside of their jurisdiction.

    It’s kind of unfortunate, because it decreases the gain potentially you get from leveraging network effect, where the value of the network rises with the square of the number of users.

    • BuelldozerEnglish
      1•4 months ago

      I wish I could upvote your comment more than once. It’s just not possible to regulate a Social Media platform such that it complies with the cultural norms and speech laws of every country in the world while allowing the free flow of ideas and comments.

      • @tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        0•4 months ago

        There was actually a really good RFC – if you’re not familiar with these, they’re normally the documents used to create most Internet standards, normally just address technical matter – put out a while back, “.sex considered dangerous”. At the time, Congress was considering passing laws to regulate obscenity on the entire Internet – a lot of the infrastructure of which we in the US ran – according to US social norms, because people were upset over access to pornography. While political speech is strongly-protected in the US, we do have an obscenity exception, and so pornographic content could be regulated in some forms, and had been, like on FCC-regulated broadcast radio and television. Parents were upset at this new Internet thing bringing lots of porn to their children, so the idea was “why don’t we just create an adult space on the Internet and make all that adult stuff go there”. And the answer here, which the RFC covers, along with some technical arguments, is that the Internet is global, and there are many different social norms around the world. You cannot just tell everyone to adopt your own. It doesn’t work.

        https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3675

        Legal and Philosophical Problems

        When it comes to sexually-explicit material, every person, court, and government has a different view of what’s acceptable and what is not. Attitudes change over time, and what is viewed as appropriate in one town or year may spark protests in the next. When faced with the slippery nature of what depictions of sexual activity should be illegal or not, one U.S. Supreme Court justice blithely defined obscenity as: “I know it when I see it”.

        In the U.S.A., obscenity is defined as explicit sexual material that, among other things, violates “contemporary community standards” – in other words, even at the national level, there is no agreed-upon rule governing what is illegal and what is not. Making matters more knotty is that there are over 200 United Nations country codes, and in most of them, political subdivisions can impose their own restrictions. Even for legal nude modeling, age restrictions differ. They’re commonly 18 years of age, but only 17 years of age in one Scandinavian country. A photographer there conducting what’s viewed as a legal and proper photo shoot would be branded a felon and child pornographer in the U.S.A. In yet other countries and groups, the entire concept of nude photography or even any photography of a person in any form may be religiously unacceptable.

        Saudi Arabia, Iran, Northern Nigeria, and China are not likely to have the same liberal views as, say, the Netherlands or Denmark. Saudi Arabia and China, like some other nations, extensively filter their Internet connection and have created government agencies to protect their society from web sites that officials view as immoral. Their views on what should be included in a .sex domain would hardly be identical to those in liberal western nations.

        Those wildly different opinions on sexual material make it inconceivable that a global consensus can ever be reached on what is appropriate or inappropriate for a .sex or .adult top-level domain. Moreover, the existence of such a domain would create an irresistible temptation on the part of conservative legislators to require controversial publishers to move to that domain and punish those who do not.

        The shoe was on the other foot there – it was us talking about our government limiting what other people in the world have access to, but the point, I think, remains the same.

        • @tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
          -1•4 months ago

          I’d also add that, regarding the stuff on political speech in particular, we have a legal history of Congress refusing to budge specifically on First Amendment matters involving foreign restriction of speech of Americans.

          British libel law is far more favorable to plaintiffs than American libel law, due in part to the First Amendment in the US. So what a number of plaintiffs who kept being unable to sue someone over libel in the US tried doing was “libel tourism” – taking their case to a foreign jurisdiction and finding an angle to try to claim that jurisdiction applied and then trying to get judgements there and then to get the US to enforce it in the US.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_Evil

          Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It is a book written by counterterrorism researcher Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the American Center for Democracy and the Economic Warfare Institute. It was published by Bonus Books of Los Angeles, California in August 2003.

          The book became the subject of international legal controversy when the Saudi businessman Khalid bin Mahfouz and his sons, Abdulrahman and Sultan, alleged in the book to be terrorist financiers, sued the author for libel in London. Although the book was not published in the United Kingdom, the lawsuit was made possible when 23 copies were purchased in England via online booksellers, and a chapter of the book was published for a short time on ABC TV’s website. Ehrenfeld refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the British courts and did not appear to defend the suit. The High Court of Justice ruled against her by default. The court ordered her and her publisher to pay £10,000 in damages to each of the three plaintiffs, with an additional £80,000 costs for a total of £110,000. Further distribution of the book from the United States was also prohibited with a previous injunction being continued.[3] Ehrenfeld was also ordered to publish a correction and apology, but had no intention of complying.[4][5]

          That resulted in Congress passing this:

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPEECH_Act

          The Securing the Protection of our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage (SPEECH) Act is a 2010 federal statutory law in the United States that makes foreign libel judgments unenforceable in U.S. courts, unless either the foreign legislation applied offers at least as much protection as the U.S. First Amendment (concerning freedom of speech), or the defendant would have been found liable even if the case had been heard under U.S. law.

          The Act was passed unanimously in both the House of Representatives and the Senate (as H.R. 2765) before being signed by President Obama on August 10, 2010.