Conversation

X was a major vehicle of the disinformation that fomented the anti-refugee and Islamophobic violence which exploded in our cities last summer and Musk has defended the rioters
– baselessly claiming that civil war is “inevitable” in the UK because of its tolerance towards migrants and different religious backgrounds
– and questioning why the far-right activist who did much to whip up the hate, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’) is in prison (he was convicted under contempt of court laws last year).

Now, Musk seeks to institutionalise his threat to our multicultural society and its rule of law by attempting to extend his funding directly to a political party.

Reform UK’s Leader Nigel Farage recently met with Musk and, according to the Financial Times, its treasurer Nick Candy said that Musk is among several billionaires ready to raise more funds than “any other political party” to create “political disruption like we have never seen before” in Britain.

Farage’s old friend, Steve Bannon – fresh out of federal prison – concurs.

Though he has ideological disagreements with Musk about immigration,
Bannon recently declared that “money and information are the twin tactical nukes of modern politics”
and celebrated the fact that Musk “can deploy both at an unprecedented scale”.

“There’s not a centrist left-wing government in Europe that will be able to withstand that onslaught”, Bannon recently told Bloomberg.

As the co-founder of Cambridge Analytica, Bannon knows what he is talking about -- He was there at the beginning of this dark chapter of disinformation,
recruiting British conservatives to the value of big data and online campaigning as far back as 2013 at a conference in Cambridge.

And the Brexit connections keep on giving.

According to the Daily Mail, Musk is being advised on his UK targeting by none other than Dominic Cummings, the former chief advisor to Boris Johnson,
who has for long evinced an admiration of tech ‘disruption’
and who, as campaign director of Vote Leave, used AggregateIQ to target voters with Islamophobic messages during the EU Referendum
– just as Farage’s Leave.EU campaign did,
boosted by RT and the Russian Embassy.

‘It is not just Elon,” the Mail claims from a source, “Dom is in constant contact with major Silicon Valley figures, who are becoming increasingly anti-woke”.

On his blog, Cummings himself has confessed that “something approaching [Carole] Cadwalladr’s worst nightmare
— that she thought happened in 2016 but did not
— is now technically feasible:
effective automated personalised communication at scale.”

The facts of history are now hard to hide and deny.

There has been a decade-long war against ‘one person, one vote’,
and the concept of a transparent media to inform our citizenry.

If we are ever to protect our democracies from this synergy of autocracy and tech, we will have to unravel these alliances of money and information and their traffic of hatred and falsehood
https://bylinetimes.com/2025/01/25/how-russian-information-warfare-primed-the-world-for-the-tech-autocracy-of-trump-and-musk/