Silicon Valley’s billionaire entrepreneurs once tried to portray themselves as socially conscious, given that their innovations benefited humanity. Their technologies have certainly changed the way we live, work, even love – for better and worse. And they’ve made them incredibly rich: the 10 wealthiest people in tech, a list dominated by US citizens, are worth over US$1.33 trillion between them. All but one of the USA’s 10 richest people made their fortunes in tech.

This wealth has lined up behind the Trump administration, with tech companies donating millions of dollars to his inauguration fund. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Uber each gave US$1 million, and tech CEOs such as Apple’s Tim Cook and OpenAI’s Sam Altman also chipped in US$1 million each.

There’s nothing normal about donations of this size. At the very least, they signalled a determination not to get on the wrong side of a president who’s quick to make enemies. They may also have indicated a desire to limit potential regulation of AI and cryptocurrencies and grab a greater share of defence spending.

But for some tech leaders, aligning with right-wing populism comes easily. They see themselves as exceptional people to whom normal rules don’t apply. They like – to use Facebook’s former motto – to move fast and break things. They’re suspicious of the state – unless, perhaps, they’re in charge. They see a kindred spirit in Trump, and none more so than Elon Musk.

Musk makes his move

Musk put his fortune at the service of getting Trump elected, appearing at his rallies, donating US$288 million and offering swing-state voters the chance to win US$1 million by signing a pro-Trump petition.

Musk, a compulsive Twitter/X user who appears to have been right-wing radicalised by his own platform, consistently retweets extremist content. He has the most followers, and in 2023, after a tweet by Joe Biden outperformed his, insisted on algorithm changes to ensure his content was given even more prominence. So whatever he touches has huge reach – particularly in the USA, where Twitter/X has the most users, and among the young men who disproportionately use it.

Buying Twitter/X may have been bad business – the company is believed to be worth a fraction of the US$44 billion Musk paid for it – but good politics. A platform that was once relatively liberal is now a right-wing bastion. Many leftist voices have left, banned extremists have been allowed back and Musk intervenes constantly to steer the conversation.

Musk’s new relationship may bring him material benefits, particularly for his company SpaceX, perhaps reflected in Trump’s inaugural pledge to plant the US flag on Mars. But more than anything, he appears to crave the political spotlight. And he’s getting it.

Trump’s second administration is oligarchic: he’s given powerful positions to an array of billionaires. And Musk, generally reckoned to be the world’s richest man, seems closest to him of all. The business leader no one voted for heads a pseudo-government organisation created specifically for him without congressional approval. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is supposed to achieve drastic public spending cuts, although its agenda is clearly more political than financial, with little actual spending reductions achieved so far. The federal bodies targeted by his inexperienced and opaque team are those Trump supporters perceive as having a liberal bias, including the Department of Education, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which provides climate data, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the world’s largest aid agency.

The USAID spending freeze imposed in January caused instant chaos. Programmes that provide vital services such as healthcare and education to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people shut down overnight. Civil society has been left reeling. USAID funds many civil society organisations and independent media working in restricted civic space conditions and conflict settings, where domestic resources simply aren’t available. Many independent Ukrainian and exiled Russian media organisations, for example, rely on its support.

If the cuts become permanent, the result will be a diminished civil society far less able to defend rights and hold the powerful to account. The fact that authoritarian leaders around the world, including in Belarus, Nicaragua and Russia, welcomed the move said it all. This wasn’t a step anyone who cares about democracy and human rights – including freedom of expression – would take.

It isn’t just with the USAID freeze that Musk has had an impact beyond US borders. Even if some funding is restored, it’s unlikely to go to Musk’s native South Africa; Trump signed an executive order freezing aid to the country and threatened to stop any future funding after the government passed a law allowing the state to redistribute land. Secretary of State Marco Rubio also refused to attend a G20 meeting in South Africa. Both Musk and Peter Thiel, the Trump-backing billionaire PayPal cofounder, grew up in extremely wealthy mining families in apartheid-era South Africa and both have been highly critical of the country’s present direction. Trump seems to be listening.

Musk has repeatedly waded into UK politics, attacking Prime Minister Keir Starmer and posting and promoting far-right content. Following a series of riots sparked by anti-migrant and anti-Muslim disinformation in the wake of a horrific knife attack, he posted that ‘civil war is inevitable’ in the UK, shared disinformation from the leader of a far-right hate group and promoted the false claim that the UK’s criminal justice system treats Muslims more leniently. His most recent efforts have been to spread smears about migrants and sexual abuse, accusing Starmer, who formerly led the criminal prosecutions agency, of being ‘complicit in the mass rapes’.

Musk has intervened in Germany too. Ahead of the 23 February election, he hosted a live-streamed 75-minute uncritical interview with Alice Weidel, leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and asserted ‘only the AfD can save Germany’. He’s repeatedly attacked Germany’s mainstream political leaders.

Zuckerberg falls into line

Musk is the most extreme case, but as those inauguration donations suggest, he’s not alone. Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp, has also taken a pro-Trump direction. In January, the company announced it was ditching its independent fact-checking programme in the USA. Zuckerberg claimed fact checking had led to excessive censorship and the move would promote free speech. Instead, Meta will adopt something similar to Twitter/X’s community notes system.

Zuckerberg’s conflation of interventions to ensure accuracy with censorship is disturbing, and there are many problems with Twitter/X’s alternative, including that most disinformation spreads before notes can correct it, and that most community notes aren’t read. Meta has already been accused of failing to prevent its platforms being used to spread hate speech that fuelled violence in India, Myanmar and recently in Ethiopia’s bloody conflict, while systematically censoring posts in support of Palestine. Under its changed policies, it’s now acceptable to accuse LGBTQI+ people of being mentally ill or refer to women as household goods or property. Trump has welcomed these changes.

Meta has also agreed to pay Trump US$25 million to settle a lawsuit he filed after the company suspended his accounts following the January 2021 insurrection, and joined the stampede of companies axing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives after Trump ended those federal government programmes. Zuckerberg’s charity, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, has also just ditched its DEI team. Meanwhile, Google has dropped diversity hiring targets and announced it will no longer observe events such as Black History Month and Pride Month, while Amazon has removed the diversity and inclusion section of its annual report.

Zuckerberg’s abrupt change of direction and the acquiescence of other tech leaders shows, not for the first time, that whatever they may say about democracy and human rights, many wealthy business leaders are willing to accommodate authoritarianism as long as they can keep making money.

Action needed

Meanwhile, disinformation continues to thrive; it’s now cheaper and easier than ever to spread it, and it’s played a big role in some recent elections, including in Austria, India and Moldova, all countries where it was mobilised in the interests of right-wing populists and nationalists of the kind Musk tends to endorse.

The power of disinformation is being boosted by developments in generative AI – the version of AI that can produce text, images and videos. They make it easy to create fake photos and videos, and even when disinformation isn’t intentional, generative AI has a habit of making up convincing-sounding wrong answers. A recent study suggests around a fifth of answers AI chatbots gave when using BBC news stories as their source contained factual errors. Yet one of the first things Trump did was reverse an executive order that established AI safeguards. His government then became one of two, along with the UK, to refuse to endorse a statement backing sustainable, open, transparent, ethical and safe AI at the AI Action Summit in Paris in February. The US government expressed concern about ‘excessive regulation’.

As new platforms emerge, populist and nationalist politicians remain particularly adept at using them. In 2024, Trump embraced TikTok and its young demographic, as did the authoritarian winner of Indonesia’s election and an outsider pro-Russia candidate who did surprisingly well in Romania. It’s an enduring challenge to have political debate on platforms that exist to get eyeballs on advertising. Algorithms keep us hooked by serving up eye-catching, sensationalist content. This rewards simplistic and populist narratives over nuance and reasoned debate.

Social media has power because so many people use it, and people can choose which platforms they use and which they don’t. Hundreds of thousands, as well as several civil society organisations and businesses, left Twitter/X following Trump’s re-election. But the broader challenges were seen in the fact that many fled to Threads, only to face another choice when Zuckerberg introduced his pro-Trump changes.

Pressure on advertisers is one answer, given the importance of ad revenue. Civil society research found that when hate speech against Black US citizens on Twitter/X tripled after Musk’s takeover, it led to a fall of around US$100 million in ad revenue. There’s also evidence of a backlash against Musk in a sharp fall in Tesla cars sales in Europe.

But it’s hard to see progress without proper and principled regulation. Yet there are huge dangers here too. The Cybercrime Convention, agreed last year, was initiated by repressive Russia and could give new tools to the many states that criminalise online expression on the pretext of combating cybercrime. The European Union’s (EU) AI Act, which came into force last August, has raised concerns about insufficient human rights safeguards. Under the act, AI systems are exempt from protections if they’re used for national security, there are loopholes allowing some surveillance systems and migrants aren’t accorded the same rights as EU citizens.

What’s clear is that tech leaders, whether Musk, Zuckerberg or those with a lower profile, can’t be trusted to self-regulate, and regulation can’t be left solely to states either, since many will use it as a pretext for repression. In difficult times, it remains necessary to assert the centrality of human rights and push for global standards that are consistent with them. Civil society voices need to be at the centre of this debate.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org