Who Governs Truth?
Musk, Zuckerberg, and the fight for Europe’s information space
Grüezi!
This Friday I’m speaking in Brussels at DEBATABLE’s event with the Jean Monnet Forum. I’m arguing in favour of the motion “Democracies should govern truth.”
Here’s a longer version of what I’ll be saying – and why I think the real question isn’t whether truth is governed, but by whom.
Brussels, 12 December 2025
The motion before us contains a trap. It invites us to imagine a Ministry of Truth – grey functionaries decreeing what citizens may believe.
The opposition will invoke Orwell, warn of slippery slopes, present themselves as defenders of liberty against censorious states.
This is a confidence trick.
The question is not whether truth is governed. Truth is governed now – by algorithms optimised for outrage, by platforms accountable to oligarchs’ whims rather than citizens’ wishes, by an industry that knows its products cause harm and chooses profit over safety.
The question is whether that governance should be democratic or plutocratic.
1. The Platforms Already Govern
Every time you open a social media application, an algorithm decides what you see. Not what your friends posted. Not what you asked for. What the algorithm calculates will keep you scrolling longest.
Research commissioned by Twitter before Elon Musk X-ed it found that – even then – the algorithm systematically boosted right-leaning content in six of seven countries studied. A separate study found substantial amplification of politically biased low-credibility content – in common parlance, trash.
This is the governance mechanism. These platforms decide what billions see, what movements grow, what candidates gain traction – according to a single optimisation function: engagement.
And engagement, as Facebook’s own researchers documented, means anger. “We are literally subsidising hate on these platforms,” one internal researcher concluded.
When my opponents tell you democratic governance of truth is dangerous, ask: compared to what? Compared to algorithmic governance optimised for outrage?
Compared to the decisions made by a handful of content moderators covering dozens of Ethiopian languages whilst a civil war spiralled toward genocide?
Compared to a system that serves 15 billion “high risk” or scammy ads every day, and makes $164 billion a year doing it?
2. The Human Cost
Professor Meareg Amare Abrha was my age – sixty – when he was killed. He taught chemistry at Ethiopia’s Bahir Dar University.
In October 2021, a Facebook page with 50,000 followers published posts accusing him of supporting rebel forces. The posts were lies. But they included his home address.
Commenters called for his murder.
He wasn’t on Facebook, but his son Abrham reported the posts repeatedly. Facebook declined to remove them.
On 2 November 2021, gunmen followed Professor Meareg home, shot him twice at close range, and left him to bleed to death in the street. Onlookers were warned they would be killed if they helped.
His body lay on the street for several hours. But one of the posts calling for his death stayed up on Facebook for over a year after he was gunned down.
Professor Meareg was not an isolated case in that conflict.
Elsewhere, in Myanmar, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission concluded that Facebook played a “determining role” in the genocide against the Rohingya people. Over 10,000 people were killed. 700,000 were displaced.
Thousands of posts called the Rohingya “dogs”, “maggots”, and “rapists” who should be “exterminated”. Facebook’s hate speech algorithm could not detect content in Myanmar’s languages. But the company had known since at least 2012 that its algorithms could cause real-world violence.
Amnesty International concluded that Meta was “an active contributor to the horrors faced by the Rohingya.”
The algorithms didn’t just fail to stop hateful content; they amplified it, they boosted it – they preferred it.
Because “rage bait” – Oxford’s 2025 word of the year – is what drives engagement.
When Frances Haugen copied thousands of internal Facebook documents in 2021, she revealed what the company knew: its “core product mechanics” spread misinformation. The harm was inseparable from the product.
Meta’s 2024 revenue: $164 billion. Fourth-quarter profit: $21 billion – up 49% year on year. The Rohingya are seeking $150 billion in reparations – about two-thirds of Zuckerberg’s personal fortune. Meta has refused.
My opponents will tell you democratic governance of platforms threatens liberty. Whose liberty?
The liberty to monetise genocide? The liberty to amplify calls for murder?
You could ask Professor Meareg. But he is dead.
3. What They Destroyed
The platforms didn’t merely evade accountability. They destroyed the institutions that might have provided it – and then won immunity from those that remained.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, declared that platforms would not be treated as publishers. Legislators intended to protect nascent bulletin boards from crushing liability.
But platforms are not bulletin boards. They do not passively host content; they promote or hide it, they recommend it, optimise it.
Don’t take my word for it. As one judge wrote in a recent Third Circuit decision, Section 230 has been exploited by an industry that “smuggles constitutional conceptions of a ‘free trade in ideas’… with no oversight, no accountability, no remedy.”
In 2004, America had nearly 9,000 local newspapers. By 2024 it had lost over a third of them. Jobs in US journalism are now barely a quarter of what they were in 2005. The US now has more McKinsey consultants – fine people! – than journalists.
Print advertising collapsed from $46 billion in 2003 to $14 billion in 2018.
Where did all the money go? Google and Facebook now capture up to 80% of digital advertising revenue in many markets. They took the economic model that sustained professional journalism – flawed as it often was – and burned it to the ground.
One in seven Americans now lives with limited or no access to local news. Research shows communities losing newspapers see decreased voter participation, increased polarisation, and more corruption.
The platforms replaced a sputtering fountain of truth with a poison well.
But do not let citizens govern the truth!
4. The Captured State
We have spoken about corporate negligence. Now we must address something equally alarming: an industry so powerful it has captured its home government.
Nobel economist Paul Krugman this week called the US a “digital narco-state” – a country where an industry that harms its users has so thoroughly captured the political system that democratic self-correction has become impossible.
Consider the evidence. The Kids Online Safety Act passed the Senate 91-3 – overwhelming bipartisan consensus of a kind that barely exists in American politics.
Then it died in the House. Speaker Mike Johnson cited free speech concerns; the tech lobby had done its work.
America’s Surgeon General had officially identified social media as harmful to children. But Surgeon Generals can be dismissed.
This is not regulatory failure. It is regulatory capture – the stage at which an industry’s power over politicians exceeds the politicians’ power over the industry.
What happens when a captured state confronts democracies that remain capable of regulation? It treats their laws as threats – and deploys coercive power to prevent enforcement.
Elon Musk – the world’s richest man and briefly a senior Trump administration figure – has spent the past year intervening directly in European elections.
In Germany, he endorsed the far-right AfD, a party German security services classified as a suspected extremist organisation. He published an op-ed in Welt am Sonntag, hosted an hour-long interview with AfD leader Alice Weidel, and appeared via video at an AfD rally telling Germans to move “past guilt.”
Friedrich Merz, Germany’s Christian Democrat chancellor, said he could not “recall a comparable case of interference, in the history of Western democracies.”
In Britain, Musk accused Prime Minister Starmer of complicity in rape, endorsed a far-right activist serving a prison sentence, and – according to the Financial Times – privately discussed with allies how Starmer might be removed before the next election.
Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez accused Musk of heading an “international reactionary” movement supporting “the heirs of Nazism”. Macron asked: “Who would have believed the owner of one of the biggest social networks would intervene directly in elections?”
Europe’s response? The Commission fined X €120 million after a two-year investigation – not for election interference or incitement, but for misleading users with its blue checkmarks. European law permits fines up to 6% of global turnover. The Commission chose 0.5%.
Then the American state stepped in to formalise what Musk had been doing on his own.
When JD Vance addressed the Munich Security Conference in February, he came not to discuss Ukraine but to lecture Europe on censorship. He criticised Romania for annulling its presidential election after documented Russian interference, saying: “If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”
Then he made the threat clear: America would “condition its support for Europe on whether its governments actually uphold free speech.”
Translation? Stop regulating American platforms.
Trump formalised this in a February 2025 memorandum authorising tariffs on countries hindering “American companies’ global competitiveness” – accusing European nations of “violating American sovereignty”.
Commerce Secretary Lutnick tied steel tariffs to demands that Europe weaken digital regulation.
If Europe demanded America change domestic laws governing its information space or face trade punishment, Americans would be outraged. When America makes precisely this demand of Europe, Europeans demur.
This is not negotiation between equals.
An industry that has captured its home government is now deploying the coercive power of the United States to prevent other democracies protecting their citizens.
5. The European Problem
Let me be clear about what I mean – and do not mean – by governing truth.
Democracies do not govern truth by decree; they govern the infrastructure that would bury it. Libel law exists. Fraud is illegal. Electoral campaigns face disclosure requirements. Broadcasting operates under public interest obligations.
The question is not whether to govern the information environment, but whether to extend existing governance to the platforms that now dominate it.
But here I must be honest about something my opponents need not say, because I will say it myself.
Europe is not well placed to do this.
The EU’s legitimacy remains contested. Its capacity for decisive action is constrained by fragmentation. When my opponents dismiss the Union as mere bureaucracy – rule by unelected officials – they are not entirely wrong.
But notice who makes this argument loudest: a man who acquired a platform through private wealth, governs it by personal whim, faces no election, no judicial review, no term limit, no recall. When Elon Musk attacks unelected power, he is not arguing for democracy. He is arguing for oligarchy – his own.
The Commission president is chosen by elected governments and confirmed by an elected Parliament. Musk was confirmed by chequebook.
Still, the critique demands an answer. Europe’s democratic institutions need renewal. The gap between Brussels and European publics is real. This is true.
But notice what follows from it – and what does not.
What follows: Europe must build institutions with deeper democratic roots, greater capacity, and genuine sovereignty over its own information space.
What does not follow: that Europe should therefore surrender that space to men who face no democratic constraint whatsoever.
The answer to imperfect democracy is not plutocracy. It is better democracy.
And here is what my opponents will not say: a fragmented Europe is precisely what they require.
An EU that cannot act is an EU that cannot regulate. Every attack on European unity – every endorsement of parties that would tear it apart – serves the same function as the tariff threats: preventing democratic publics from governing the platforms that govern them.
How can you credibly regulate the platform your citizens use to discuss politics when its American owner launches your military satellites? How do you enforce standards on truth against a country that ties them to steel tariffs?
The interventions in European elections are not incidental to the business model. They are its political arm.
6. The Abuse Is Real
When critics warn that speech laws become tools of repression, they are not wrong. Elected governments – not just dictatorships, elected governments in G20 nations, in NATO, in the EU – have used platform regulations to silence journalists, suppress protest coverage, and harass opposition voices.
This isn’t hypothetical. It’s happening now.
But notice what else those same governments do. They run sophisticated disinformation operations on the very platforms they selectively regulate. They deploy coordinated troll armies. They exploit algorithmic amplification to drown out critics.
The authoritarians do not choose between captured regulation and ungoverned platforms. They use both. The absence of democratic platform governance does not protect against them – it hands them another weapon.
The answer cannot be: leave platforms unaccountable because governments abuse power. Governments will abuse power regardless.
The answer is: build institutions with genuine democratic accountability – judicial review, transparency, the capacity to remove those who fail – and apply them to platforms and states alike.
The risks from bad governance are real.
But the risks from its absence are worse.
7. The Choice
Do not mistake America’s abdication of responsible governance for inevitability. The United States once had a Fairness Doctrine. It required broadcasters to present controversial issues honestly and to air competing views. Reagan abolished it.
What followed – talk radio, Fox News, InfoWars, Musk’s X – the poisoned information well we now inhabit – was deliberate policy choice, not law of nature.
American democracy did not reject the governance of truth. It surrendered it – to an industry that then captured the lobbies and legislature. That is a warning, not a model.
The motion asks whether democracies should govern truth. The honest answer: they must – but only if they hang together.
Regulation requires leverage. Leverage requires scale. Scale requires unity.
Benjamin Franklin told his fellow revolutionaries they must hang together or hang separately. Europe faces the same choice. The platforms are counting on you to choose to dangle separately on rope they will charge you for.
The alternative to governance is not liberty. It is subjection to infrastructure designed in Menlo Park, deployed from San Francisco, and enforced from Washington – built by men who have told us, openly, that they consider democracy an obsolete operating system.
I ask you to support the motion.
Thanks for reading!
Best
Adrian
I, for one, am convinced! Thank you for the detailed arguments. Let's hope Europe is listening!