A survey conducted by Reuters news agency in January found that an increasing number of British universities are choosing to reduce their engagement on the social media platform X, in response to its support for campaigns of disinformation which sparked racist and Islamophobic riots in the UK last summer, and which are continuing to sow hatred, discord, and violence through the country.

The role that the platform formerly known as Twitter played in the re-election of Donald Trump to the White House has added to disquiet around the world as to the power and influence wielded with increasing degrees of brazen and boastful machismo by its billionaire owner Elon Musk.

Mr. Musk of course not only hosted a sycophantic interview with the Republican candidate on his site during the 2024 presidential election campaign, but also offered Trump-supporting voters in swing states the chance to win large cash prizes.

Now set to be rewarded with a senior role in the Donald's new administration, his once risible figure – whose pot-smoking podcast antics did little seven years ago to reassure his own investors – is fast becoming for real the kind of megalomaniacal movie villain that he's so often been caricatured as resembling – somewhere between the Silicon Valley magnate Max Zorin and the space industry mogul Hugo Drax, both overly ambitious entrepreneur-psychopaths from the James Bond franchise.

Apparently, in deference to the new social media world order heralded by the second coming of America's orange-faced messiah of bigotry and bombast, Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook has announced that it will no longer employ its armies of fact-checkers, and will instead, like X, now leave it up to its communities to police themselves as disinformation vigilantes take control of social media's re-wilded Wild West.

We might note in passing that January also happened to see another tech giant – Apple – being called upon (and eventually deciding) to recall its new AI-powered news alert system, which had been churning out fake headlines (and attributing them to legitimate news outlets) with reckless abandon.

Meanwhile, TikTok has become a bargaining chip – or hostage – in trade negotiations between China and the new American administration.

Stateside – for the time bring at least – it looks like the political manipulation of the media, intentional disinformation, and careless misinformation might have won the day, in this triumph of post-truth anarchy. The irony of the fact that Trump (a man who once claimed to have invented the word 'fake') chose to dub his own antisocial mendacity platform 'Truth Social' hasn't been lost on the rest of the world.

And so, back in Britain, we've been starting to see such shoots of resistance as Reuters has witnessed emerging from our seats of higher education – and even in our mainstream media and mainstream politics.

Indeed, also in January, the UK Science Secretary emphasized that social media platforms operating in Britain must abide by British law – and that this “law says illegal content must be taken down”.

This increasingly public backlash has been caused by Elon Musk himself having, in his manic hubris, gone far too far.

Mr. Musk no doubt thought he was merely stoking the fires of his preferred brand of knee-jerk populism when he voiced his support for convicted criminal and notorious bigot Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a hero of the UK's Far Right who has taken the name of a famous football hooligan called Tommy Robinson – a thug whom Elon Musk's (even more deluded) father Errol has since lauded as "very likely" to become Britain's next Prime Minister.

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That didn't go down well with many people in Britain – and certainly not with the infamous Brexiteer (and now leader of the radical right-wing political party Reform UK) Nigel Farage. 

Mr. Farage – elected to Westminster last summer for the first time as a Member of Parliament – has spent much of his time since then focusing not on his constituency of Clacton-on-Sea but on multiple visits to the United States, to woo his old friend Donald Trump and his new friend Elon Musk.

Indeed, rumor has it that the beer-swilling, chain-smoking Europhobe had been hoping for the same kind of multi-million-dollar commitment to his own political ambitions with which Musk furnished the Trump campaign.

But when nasty Nigel found he had no choice but to distance himself from Musk's support for the far nastier Tommy Robinson, he soon discovered that the eccentric Elon's temper could be swift and merciless.

Mr. Musk retorted that Farage "doesn't have what it takes" to lead his own political party, in a spat which may anticipate would lead to an eventual rift between Musk and Trump when those two massive egos inevitably come to clash.

Farage may well however have been quietly grateful for this split with his "friend" Elon when the latter’s credibility took a further nosedive in the UK, after he chose to highlight what he saw as Prime Minister Keir Starmer's failure to crack down with sufficient legal vigour against child abuse gangs (reported to predominantly comprise men of ethnic minority heritage) – and to claim that safeguarding minister Jess Phillips deserves to be put in prison for her refusal to hold an inquiry (that is, another inquiry) into those criminal activities. 

After Musk described Ms Phillips as a "rape genocide apologist", she received what she has called a "deluge of hate" from Musk's extremist disciples – along with threats against her life. She has, as a result, been forced to increase her security in response to abuse – provoked by Musk's comments – which has been condemned by voices from all sides of mainstream politics and much of the mainstream media.

While one of her Cabinet colleagues denounced Musk's "disgraceful smear" and a former editor of the populist Sun newspaper called one right-wing columnist's opportunist attack on Phillips and Starmer "shameful", perhaps her most robust support came from a most unexpected quarter – the Confederation of British Industry, whose Chair – a man called Rupert Soames (who also happened to be the grandson of Winston Churchill) had this to say, "If anybody wants to get at Jess Phillips, they’re going to have to come through me first … How is it in this world that you can have somebody who can land a space rocket in between two chopsticks, who can create this enormous car company and then becomes obsessed by throwing darts at politicians and people in other countries?”

It was refreshing, many people observed, to see that Mr. Soames was willing to take the unlikely step of maintaining his family tradition (at least, in the mythos of the public imagination) of standing up to fascist bullies.

As the British Foreign Secretary has also commented, there's a big difference between a belief in freedom of expression (which Musk, Trump, Robinson and their acolytes relentlessly cite in defence of their calumnies) and a toleration or promotion of hate speech, incitement to violence, and wilful lies.

In early January, that same Foreign Secretary also had to deploy his finest powers of diplomacy to suggest that Donald Trump’s rhetoric may not always align with his actions – and that we must therefore remain hopeful that he won’t necessarily follow through on his threats to impose universal trade tariffs sufficient to cripple the global economy, or to invade the sovereign Danish territory of Greenland, and thereby force NATO to go to war with itself.

At the same time as our planet looks like it might be overwhelmed by all this madness – a rabid incoherence that we might recognise as the Musk-infused stench of a vintage Trump – there are mild signs that the tide might be starting to turn – in some small corners of the world – as evidenced in a gradual exodus of users in protest against the excesses of X. 

But don't hold your breath: these hints of resistance may well take a very long time to come to anything, if they ever come to anything at all. 

Yet, let's hang on to that hope: the faith that, in the end, the truth will out – that the truth, at last, will set us free.