The BBC was left red-faced by its interview with Musk

The BBC’s interview of Elon Musk last week should go down as one of the most hilarious displays of media ineptitude ever. But most of the world’s mainstream media chose to ignore the ignominy, with almost all news reports on the interview, from The New York Times and Washington Post to CNN and Time magazine focusing on every little thing that Musk said except for when he showed up his interviewer for what he was—a journalist who had been too lazy to gather the facts needed to back up his allegations.

In fact, that part of the interaction, which lasted more than an hour, was perhaps the most important four minutes of the broadcast, because it addressed the popular accusation that Twitter has been facing ever since Musk bought the social media company last October—that the platform was now giving free rein to “hate speech”.

The interviewer was James Clayton, BBC’s North America technology correspondent. This sounds like a pretty important position, since North America creates, produces and sells plenty of technology. Clayton told Musk that in recent months Twitter had seen a rise in hate speech. Musk replied with a perfectly reasonable question—what did Clayton mean by hate speech and could he give an example?

Clayton could not cite an example, but Musk persisted (bit.ly/3MCUvq5). Clayton, cornered, said that he had seen a rise in posts that elicited reactions that were “slightly sexist, slightly racist.” Musk asked him whether he thought that “slightly sexist, slightly racist” posts should be banned. By this time, Clayton had dug himself an argument grave that he kept on digging. He said many organizations he knew were making hate-speech allegations. Musk again asked him to give an example and what the BBC considered ‘hate speech’.

The confused Clayton was reduced to stammering. Musk bluntly told him: “You cannot give me a single example of hateful content, not even one tweet. And yet you claimed that hateful content was high. That is false, you just lied.”

This was certainly a landmark—an interviewee calling his interviewer a liar on his face. But Clayton had no answer and could only lamely suggest that they move on another topic.

Musk laid bare the illogic and hypocrisy inherent in the current left-liberal discourse on many issues, including freedom of speech. This is because the definition of hate speech has been reduced to any opinion—or even a joke—that you do not agree with.

After taking over Twitter, Musk gave a bunch of independent journalists access to the company’s internal correspondence. This investigation has provided evidence that under the name of content moderation, the company was indulging in widespread censorship on matters ranging from criticism of the Joe Biden administration and gender politics to vaccine scepticism and even praise for the Narendra Modi government in India. It was quietly shadow-banning users—reducing the visibility of their posts, a charge that it had consistently denied.

This has not pleased the Western establishment, increasingly controlled by a vague left-liberal ideology that, paradoxically, is backed by some of the richest corporations on earth, from Amazon to Big Pharma. Yet, when confronted by a renegade billionaire—Musk is the second wealthiest person on earth—they are unable to give a convincing answer. Pre-Musk Twitter axed Donald Trump’s handle, a sitting American president, but allegedly refused to clamp down on child pornography and posts by the regressive Taliban government in Afghanistan that degraded women. This does not seem right by any civilized norms.

Musk is of course hardly an angel. Even though he calls himself a “free speech absolutist”, he is very careful not to utter a word about human rights or freedom of expression in China, where he has one of the largest manufacturing facilities for his Tesla electric vehicles. He is a pragmatic businessman. When asked in the BBC interview about Twitter banning posts—as demanded by the Indian government—on a BBC documentary on Narendra Modi that accused Modi of complicity in the 2002 Gujarat riots, he said that he was not aware of the specific case, but he knew that India had strict social media laws, so he would rather obey the laws of a country than see his people go to prison.

Both Twitter and BBC World News are banned in China.

After Musk took over Twitter, many thousands of accounts that had been suspended have been restored. These include many people—including doctors, academics and virologists—who were doubtful about the efficacy of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s covid vaccines and the theory that the virus was natural-born and not engineered in a laboratory in Wuhan. While the jury is out on both these matters—and my guess is that it will be out forever—many other accounts that the Musk-owned Twitter has allowed seem to be run by half-crazed conspiracy theorists. For instance, the company is facing lawsuits which allege that it failed to remove posts that trivialize or deny the Holocaust.

But the issue is deeper. As Salman Rushdie, who should know more about this than any other living person, once said, freedom of speech is fundamentally the right to offend. Musk’s Twitter lets people from all across the social, political and ideological spectrum a chance to freely offend. And also to make fools of themselves in the full glare of the world. How could that be a bad thing?

Sandipan Deb is a former editor of ‘Financial Express’, and founder-editor of ‘Open’ and ‘Swarajya’ magazines