In Italy, there was a time when only one question mattered in politics: are you with or against him?
Silvio Berlusconi has been the most influential Italian politician of the last 40 years. For decades, generations of politicians, journalists and citizens have been trained to think about complex policy issues, ideologies, and alliances under the lens of a single question: are you with or against Berlusconi?
Needless to say, this way of thinking removed complexity from any discussions on serious policy issues, making bipartisan agreements almost impossible.
With the intensification of Elon Musk’s exposure due to his management of Twitter/X, we should not make the same mistake. In other words: to assess complex digital policy issues, we should NOT ask: are you with or against Elon Musk?
Instead, given the inconsistency of Musk’s thoughts and actions (not differently from Berlusconi’s), we should evaluate his decisions on a case-by-case scenario. Most importantly, we should not consider every Musk’s enemy as an ally, and vice versa.
For instance:
the ridiculously bad management of Musk’s takedown requests from Brazil courts should not make us endorse the overreach of a Brazilian judge that bans social media and VPNs - just like any authoritarian country;
the fact that Musk shared racist conspiracies about the UK riots does not mean that we should enhance a badly designed, potentially censorial law such as the Online Safety Act;
the ego-centred shitstorm between Musk and EU Commissioner Breton should not make us deny that the EU's new content moderation law (the Digital Services Act) offers effective potential for political weaponisation and speech censorship.
On one hand, the Berlusconification of Elon Musk reinforces his narrative of victim persecuted by a rigged ‘system’ (either run by Communists or the “Woke mind virus”). On the other, it opens the door to legitimising bad digital policies.
Instead, two types of accountability can really hurt Musk: tracking his inconsistencies (why is he banning content in Turkey and not in Brazil? Why is he obscuring content contrary to his political - or personal - taste?) and his decisions to host terrible content (this ensures that no advertisers will come back anytime soon, keeping Twitter’s finances in full red).
In this case, the market - not censorial laws - seems the best manner to punish a dumb billionaire. Silvio Berlusconi would probably agree as well.