Why did Elon Musk purchase Twitter? His official answer — to defend free speech and democracy — is so unconvincing that the question will not go away. Musk’s repeated appeals to these ideals to justify important decisions he has made since taking over are so confounding that they raise deep suspicions about his motives.
For example, Musk castigated the decision to remove former US president Donald Trump’s account, saying that “freedom of speech is the bedrock of a strong democracy.” However, Trump’s account was removed because he was using it to spread conspiracy theories about the election to a wide audience with increasingly violent language.
It is difficult to imagine a more effective way to undermine democracy than to give the president of the United States a platform to claim that a free and fair election that he lost was “stolen.” How would allowing Trump, still the leader of the Republican Party and the former leader of a democratic country, to use Twitter to attack democracy make democracy stronger?
A democratic system relies on widespread acceptance of the legitimacy of its rules. This legitimacy is expressed, most obviously, in voting. So, it is no accident that those seeking to destroy the legitimacy of democracy spread disinformation that undermines trust in the electoral system.
However, there are other ways to undermine democratic legitimacy. Democracy is based on political equality. The most obvious expression of this is the principle of “one person, one vote.” But political equality has a broader significance — it means that each of our voices can be heard. As the philosopher Stephen Darwall has said, in a democracy, it must be possible to speak truth to power.
Preserving democratic legitimacy thus means protecting a democratic information space — a domain of mutual trust in which citizens feel confident that they can debate and criticize freely on the basis of a shared consensus about reality. There are well-established methods to undermine a shared sense of reality, and hence destroy the possibility of a democratic information space. Giving a platform to powerful people who spread outrageous conspiracy theories is one of them.
There are plenty of others. In their book Merchants of Doubt, historians Naomi Oreskes of Harvard and Erik Conway of the California Institute of Technology showed how both the tobacco industry and the fossil-fuel industry funded research intended to spread doubt about the scientific consensus surrounding smoking and climate change. The result was policy paralysis.
Undermining public trust by sowing illegitimate doubt destroyed the possibility of a democratic information space to deliberate these issues. Even if you are concerned about climate change, you might oppose efforts to mitigate it if you believe that the real agenda behind those efforts is a plot to subjugate humanity under an eco-totalitarian regime.
All that is needed to destroy the possibility of a democratic information space for particular political issues, such as climate change, is to provide a platform for, and give legitimacy to, would-be propagandists. However, it is possible to generalize this strategy — to target the possibility of democratic legitimacy tout court, by destroying the possibility of consensus on any issue.
To do so, one would need a platform that gave equal weight to all voices spreading conspiracy theories about every imaginable issue of public political concern. Kremlin operatives attempted this with their RT television channel. Musk is now attempting this strategy with Twitter.
It is clear why the fossil-fuel industry would want to undermine the possibility of democratically sanctioned action on climate change. But why would the world’s richest man want to undermine the legitimacy of democracy itself?
The answer, by now, should be clear. In a healthy democracy, a shared democratic information space allows everyone to speak truth to anyone. This is the essence of political equality. In a healthy democracy, a middle-class journalist can publish well-researched exposes of multinational corporations or spectacularly wealthy individuals that contribute to a popular consensus in favor of constraining their actions, increasing their taxes, or otherwise holding them to account. If one destroys that information space by nurturing the spread of mass suspicion, it would no longer be possible to marshal citizens against the powerful in this way.
For powerful individuals, democratic legitimacy is a threat, because it is a check on their power. Why would one of the world’s most powerful individuals not want to eliminate it?
Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University, is the author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.
opyright: Project Syndicate
Lockheed Martin on Tuesday responded to concerns over delayed shipments of F-16V Block 70 jets, saying it had added extra shifts on its production lines to accelerate progress. The Ministry of National Defense on Monday said that delivery of all 66 F-16V Block 70 jets — originally expected by the end of next year — would be pushed back due to production line relocations and global supply chain disruptions. Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said that Taiwan and the US are working to resolve the delays, adding that 50 of the aircraft are in production, with 10 scheduled for flight
Victory in conflict requires mastery of two “balances”: First, the balance of power, and second, the balance of error, or making sure that you do not make the most mistakes, thus helping your enemy’s victory. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has made a decisive and potentially fatal error by making an enemy of the Jewish Nation, centered today in the State of Israel but historically one of the great civilizations extending back at least 3,000 years. Mind you, no Israeli leader has ever publicly declared that “China is our enemy,” but on October 28, 2025, self-described Chinese People’s Armed Police (PAP) propaganda
On Sunday, 13 new urgent care centers (UCC) officially began operations across the six special municipalities. The purpose of the centers — which are open from 8am to midnight on Sundays and national holidays — is to reduce congestion in hospital emergency rooms, especially during the nine-day Lunar New Year holiday next year. It remains to be seen how effective these centers would be. For one, it is difficult for people to judge for themselves whether their condition warrants visiting a major hospital or a UCC — long-term public education and health promotions are necessary. Second, many emergency departments acknowledge
Chinese Consul General in Osaka Xue Jian (薛劍) on Saturday last week shared a news article on social media about Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s remarks on Taiwan, adding that “the dirty neck that sticks itself in must be cut off.” The previous day in the Japanese House of Representatives, Takaichi said that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute “a situation threatening Japan’s survival,” a reference to a legal legal term introduced in 2015 that allows the prime minister to deploy the Japan Self-Defense Forces. The violent nature of Xue’s comments is notable in that it came from a diplomat,
RSS