Can Elon Musk take on the tech censors?

After three centuries of failing to assert power over the printed press, the House of Commons is finding the digital world easier to conquer. The Online Safety Bill now going through parliament will give ministers the power to decide what can and can’t be said online by banning what they regard as ‘harmful’. The word is not very well defined – which, of course, gives sweeping powers to the government regulators who will define it. It will be one of the most ambitious censorship laws that the world has ever seen.

Enter Elon Musk. His $44 billion takeover of Twitter is intended, he says, not to make money but to defend free speech. His rationale – combined with his criticisms of ‘woke’ films on Netflix – has caused horror in certain quarters in America about Twitter lurching to the right. No. 10 is nervous too, reminding Musk that new UK laws will oblige him to ‘protect users from harm’ – by which they mean ‘protecting’ them from reading the wrong kind of tweets. If Musk is a ‘free speech fundamentalist’ – his words – then Britain may be his first battleground.

The new UK law certainly means business. Companies that publish ‘harmful’ content could be liable for fines of up to 10 per cent of their income – i.e. billions of pounds. This is essentially designed to terrify Silicon Valley into upping its own censorship. Until Musk came along it was working nicely. Government critics like the far-left Novara Media, the Socialist Workers party and even David Davis, a Tory backbencher, have had their videos and accounts suspended.

Such is the nature of bot censorship. Millions of words and thousands of hours of videos are uploaded every minute – so computer algorithms are used to scan and assess if they come close to crossing a line.