“Threat of personal sanction is much more effective on executives than the risk of corporate fines.”
Liability Check
The former vice president of Twitter’s European office is calling for Elon Musk to be arrested or sanctioned in the United Kingdom for inciting violence.
Bruce Daisley, who was vice president of Twitter’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa operations from 2012 until 2020, suggested in an opinion piece for The Guardian that Britain’s new Prime Minister Keir Starmer could make an example of Musk by throwing the book at him.
Though it didn’t make huge waves in the US, the murders of three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the English city of Southport — and the wave of disinformation, fearmongering, and race rioting that has followed — has been a nonstop source of coverage in the UK.
As is his apparent nature, Musk began posting hysterical half-baked predictions about an inevitable “civil war” in the wake of the three young girls’ murders. As Daisley argues, that sort of claim and other fake news Musk has shared and deleted surrounding the tragedy are similar to the incitement to violence Donald Trump was accused of after he posted support for his supporters storming the US Capitol building in January 2021.
“Musk and fellow executives should be reminded of their criminal liability for their actions under existing laws,” the ex-Twitter exec wrote, insisting that the country’s Online Safety Act of 2023 “should be beefed up with immediate effect.”
Handle It
While the UK does have its own media regulator, Ofcom, Daisley posits that Starmer and his team may do well to decide whether it’s up to handling Musk’s “blurringly fast actions.”
Though sites like X can and have been fined for violating various laws they’re beholden to, the former Twitter Europe chief says that “personal sanction” might motivate Musk more because it could constrict his freedom of movement in the UK.
“In my experience, that threat of personal sanction is much more effective on executives than the risk of corporate fines,” he writes. “Were Musk to continue stirring up unrest, an arrest warrant for him might produce fireworks from his fingertips, but as an international jet-setter it would have the effect of focusing his mind.”
It’s a solid argument, and one that Daisley as an ex-Twitter executive is uniquely positioned to make. Whether anyone in the new Labor regime or elsewhere in Europe will listen, however, is another story.
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