Issue:
April 2025
It is time for the FCCJ to quit Elon Musk’s poisonous platform
Mention the name Elon Musk these days and you may be met with foam-flecked fury.
His so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been frantically shredding the federal bureaucracy in the United States, and as Edward Carr of the Economist points out, DOGE has “broken laws with glee and callously destroyed careers. It has made false claims about waste and seized personal data protected by law. Some federal employees have had to send a weekly email listing five things they did last week. But the inbox is full, and they bounce back”.
The blowback from this libertarian rampage has helped tank the share price of Tesla, the electric vehicle pioneer that Musk joined soon after its founding in 2003. But it is not just DOGE that has been stoking anger. The world’s wealthiest man has been causing offence and outrage by turning X, the social media platform formerly called Twitter that he acquired in 2022, into a vector for disinformation, conspiracy theories and far-right propaganda.
I am proposing that the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan join a groundswell of media organisations, universities, NGOs, public institutions and government ministries, as well as prominent individuals, in quitting the platform.
Media organisations that already have abandoned X include the European Federation of Journalists, French newspapers Le Monde, Libération, Ouest-France and Sud Ouest; the Guardian (UK); Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet (Sweden); National Public Radio (USA) and Vanguardia (Spain).
In Germany, over 60 universities and other higher education institutions have quit X. In Britain, Oxford University’s Merton College, of which the Japanese Emperor is an alumnus and honorary fellow, is among the high-profile departures. So too are three government ministers in Spain and the city of Barcelona, the city of Paris, the German Army (Bundeswehr) and German Defence Ministry, the Bundesbank and even the Norwegian police force … plus a long list of celebrities.
In total, X is believed to have 650 million active users. Since buying the platform, Musk has utilised his own large following (officially, 219.9 million) to amplify fake news and far-right conspiracy theories. In just one week last year, the New York Times found that almost one third of 171 posts by Musk were fake, misleading or lacking in vital context. In June 2024, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate detailed how under Musk’s ownership, "racist, homophobic, neo-Nazi, antisemitic or conspiracy content” was unmoderated on the site.
Increasingly, Musk has used his global megaphone to aggressively intervene in politics. In Europe, his radical right-wing interventions align with the strategy of Vladimir Putin to destabilise democracy, centrist governments, and bedrock institutions such as the European Union and NATO.
Nazi-style salutes
Musk has energetically campaigned for the Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) party, which Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has placed under surveillance for suspected right-wing extremism. Figures in the party have used Nazi slogans and downplayed the Holocaust. One AfD member of the Bundestag, the German parliament, has described himself as “the friendly face of National Socialism”.
"It's good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything," Musk told an AfD rally in January. “Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents,” he said, adding “there is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”
Two days before, at a parade to celebrate Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president, Musk had made Nazi-style salutes in front of the world’s television cameras.
Jewish leaders and historians have condemned the billionaire.
Dani Dayan, the chair of Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, said Musk’s call to “move beyond” the crimes of Nazi Germany was “an insult to the victims of Nazism and a clear danger to the democratic future of Germany”. Jens-Christian Wagner, a historian who runs the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial, said Musk “is a mixture of mad and right-wing extremist and that is particularly dangerous”.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Musk’s words “about ‘great Germany’ and ‘the need to forget about German guilt for Nazi crimes’ sounded all too familiar and ominous”.
Disinformation, incitement in the UK
Britain is another focus of Musk’s political intervention. He has championed the cause of Britain’s best-known far-right activist, Tommy Robinson, who is currently in prison, and during last summer’s rioting in British cities against asylum-seekers, Musk’s postings on X verged on incitement to violence. One such post stated “civil war is inevitable” in the UK.
The Financial Times reported that Musk has held meetings to discuss how to oust Keir Starmer as British prime minister, and he wrote on X that “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government”.
Musk has accused Starmer’s Labour government of covering up sexual abuse committed by grooming gangs of Pakistani-origin men. He labelled safeguarding minister Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist”, despite her long record of supporting victims of the gangs. Phillips said she experienced a “deluge of hate” following Musk’s false accusation on X.
In March, Mark Kelly, the Democrat senator for Arizona and a former US navy combat pilot, made his third visit to Kyiv and met with wounded troops and Ukrainian officials. “What I saw proved to me we can’t give up on the Ukrainian people,” Kelly posted on ‘X’. “Everyone wants this war to end, but any agreement has to protect Ukraine’s security and can’t be a giveaway to Putin.”
To which Musk replied, “You are a traitor.”
On March 9, Musk boasted that Starlink, the satellite communications system owned by his SpaceX company, was “the backbone of the Ukrainian army” and that “their entire frontline would collapse if I turned it off”. Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, replied that his government paid for Ukraine’s access to Starlink, adding, “If SpaceX proves to be an unreliable provider, we will be forced to look for other suppliers.”
“Be quiet, small man,” Musk retorted. “There is no substitute for Starlink.”
(Before entering politics, Sikorski worked as a freelance war correspondent in Afghanistan and Angola in the 1980s. His wife is Anne Applebaum, the equally distinguished American journalist and historian.)
Secret talks with Putin
The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk has been in secret contact with Vladimir Putin since 2022. In 2024, Musk proposed a peace deal for Ukraine that was highly favourable to Russia. ("F*** off is my very diplomatic reply to you," Kyiv’s ambassador to Germany responded.)
Tesla’s factory in Shanghai accounts for more than half of the EV maker’s global deliveries and has benefited from generous government incentives and cheap financing from Chinese banks.
In public, Musk has avoided criticizing the Chinese Communist Party, and in a 2022 interview with the Financial Times, he proposed making Taiwan a “special administrative zone” of China, like Hong Kong. The following year, he called Taiwan “an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China” and compared its relationship with the mainland to that of Hawaii and the United States.
As head of DOGE, Musk has relished shredding the US Federal bureaucracy, at the cost of tens of thousands of jobs and countless government programmes. Over 20 years, SpaceX and Tesla have received more than $38 billion in aid, funding and government orders according to a Washington Post investigation. Musk’s key role in the Trump administration therefore creates massive conflicts of interest. Musk is not employed by the government and is answerable only to Trump. His central role in the Trump administration is particularly problematic for the FCCJ, as the club has always prided itself on being independent of governments and political parties.
Time to quit
On 26 November 2024, the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) stated that it could “no longer ethically participate in a social network that its owner has transformed into a machine of disinformation and propaganda”.
EFJ President Maja Sever said: “The social media site X has become the preferred vector for conspiracy theories, racism, far-right ideas and misogynistic rhetoric. X is a platform that no longer serves the public interest at all, but the particular ideological and financial interests of its owner and his political allies.”
On 20 January 2025, Le Monde published a lengthy editorial by its director Jérôme Fenoglio. He wrote: “The billionaire has transformed [X] into an extension of his political cause, a form of libertarianism increasingly close to the far right. He has turned it into an instrument of the pressure he wants to put on his competitors or on Europe's social-democrat governments ... the intensification of Musk's activism, the formalization of his position within the Trump power apparatus and the increasing toxicity of the exchanges led us to the conclusion that the usefulness of our presence weighs less than the many side-effects.”
Announcing its decision in November to quit X, the Guardian said: “The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.”
The principles at stake may appear straightforward, yet the path to securing agreement for the FCCJ to quit X has been anything but.
Indulge me a little while I give you a taste of my frustration.
I first proposed quitting X to the Board of Directors in January. At its February meeting, the Board dodged the issue by adding an account at Bluesky, an alternative social media site to which many refugees from X have migrated. However, the club still maintained its account with X. My intent was to propose a motion at the general membership meeting held on March 27, but I was informed that FCCJ bylaws have been changed to make it very difficult to add a motion to an agenda already decided by a Board.
I was able to join the membership meeting by Zoom. For two hours, I waited patiently in the Zoom anteroom but was never invited to discuss X. After the last committee chair had finally run out of words, the FCCJ president, Dan Sloan, moved to close the meeting. I objected that any other business had not been called and was granted less than five minutes to speak.
Is it any wonder that correspondents in Tokyo are willing to forgo a free meal and stay away from such meetings?
On a brighter note, one of the directors assures me that the Board will likely approve deleting the X account at its April meeting. Fingers crossed that good sense shall prevail!
Lew Simons, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former president of the FCCJ (1993-94), sent me this rousing message: “You most certainly have my support in this worthy effort. Musk is a terrifying threat to the United States and the world. He and his poisonous X platform must be thrown into history's rubbish bin. Keep up your good work!”
Peter McGill served as FCCJ president from 1990-1991, the youngest in the club’s history.
