Who is the fool here?: This is what the dispute between Scholz, Habeck and Musk is really about

Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger Who is the fool here?: This is what the dispute between Scholz, Habeck and Musk is really about Sven Christian Schulz • 10 hours • 5 minutes reading time Elon Musk has mocked the Chancellor and his deputy. Of all the problems that Olaf Scholz and Robert Habeck are currently facing, the insults from Elon Musk are undoubtedly among the less significant. And yet the guerrilla war between the richest man in the world and the two highest-ranking representatives of the red-green German minority government is out of line, even in these times that are not exactly short of oddities. After the failure of the traffic light coalition, Musk called the German Chancellor a "fool" in a post on his network X, without going into what exactly he found so foolish about Scholz. The Chancellor himself reacted on Sunday evening on Caren Miosga's television. The Social Democrat said he felt ennobled by the attack. He didn't want to say anything more: "I don't comment on tech billionaires." Musk, on the other hand, had already taken aim at Habeck and also called the Green Vice Chancellor a "fool." The reason, however, was not the end of the traffic light coalition or Habeck's return to X on Thursday after more than five years of abstinence, but a video of the Vice Chancellor that went viral on Saturday. Habeck puts Musk on a par with China In a speech in Neuhardenberg, Brandenburg, Habeck addressed the role of social networks such as X and Tiktok in public discourse and accused the operators of not promoting freedom of expression, but of manipulating social opinion through their algorithms. The authorities must regulate social networks more strictly, Habeck had demanded. "We cannot put democratic discourse in the hands of Elon Musk and Chinese software." The dispute is reigniting an old debate: who will have the say in social networks in the future - the state or their billionaire owners? The major platforms have been criticized for years because of their non-transparent algorithms. The Meta Group, which owns Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram, recently deliberately made political content disappear. Anyone who does not explicitly tick a box in the settings will mainly see entertainment content on the Instagram or Threads platforms. Media research by the "Washington Post" before the US election found that users could not even write the word "vote" without their content being downgraded by the algorithm. The platform Tiktok, which belongs to the Chinese group Bytedance, made headlines in its early years because its moderation teams apparently limited the reach of clips of people with disabilities or obesity or queer people. This is evident from internal moderation guidelines. The reasoning at the time: The platform wanted to protect users from bullying. Musk sees himself as a fighter for freedom of expression Elon Musk, in turn, had positioned himself as an advocate of unlimited freedom of expression at the beginning of the Twitter takeover. As early as April 2022, a few months before the official takeover, Musk posted: "I hope even my worst critics stay on Twitter, because that's what freedom of expression means." A year later, the 53-year-old surprised everyone with a step that was unusual in the social media industry: his platform disclosed the recommendation algorithms used to send posts to users. At least in its external presentation, Musk relies on a certain form of transparency. But the reality on the platform, which has since been renamed X, is different. Shortly after the takeover, Musk had journalists he didn't like temporarily blocked, and the same fate befell parody accounts that made fun of Musk. At one point, users noticed that links to media websites that Musk doesn't like took a noticeably long time to load. During the US election campaign, research on the Republican candidate JD Vance was removed from the platform - and supporter profiles for Kamala Harris disappeared. On election day itself, RND research revealed that the platform was mainly displaying pro-Trump content to new accounts with IP addresses in the US. In at least one case, Musk is said to have instructed his developers to push his own tweets more in the algorithm under threat of dismissal. There is also hardly any moderation on the platform anymore: disinformation and conspiracy theories have had free reign there since then.