I GOT into a spat on X/Twitter with someone who was mocking the Bishop of Oxford’s call for Christians to consider their engagement with X. Not to relitigate, but it made me think about our unavoidable engagements with technology companies. This is, in some ways, a question of personal morality, which touches even those few Church Times readers who do not sit in the House of Lords.
I use X, although I think that Elon Musk is a profoundly wicked man whose destruction of the USAID system has arguably condemned innumerable women and children to ghastly deaths from Aids. He has used his control of X to incite racial hatred in Europe as well as the United States. He has deliberately promoted the use of an “AI” that makes it easy to produce sexualised deepfakes of women and children and then to circulate them. Under the threat of a global political backlash, he restricted this ability only to the 650,000 or so people prepared to pay for it.
But, as a free user, one who will never pay anything to any entity controlled by Mr Musk, I cost him some minuscule amount a year, and I benefit from the people whom I read there. I am very careful to avoid the “For You” feed, and stick to lists of people whose opinions I want to see. Even then, I find fascist propaganda intruded on my screen by the algorithm, but very much less than I would otherwise.
One answer would be to abandon social media entirely, but let’s be serious. We must just recognise that every platform has its drawbacks. Twitter could be horribly cruel before Mr Musk reached it, when its policy was to enforce a smug American progressive orthodoxy.
Bluesky, to which many liberal Americans fled after Mr Musk’s takeover of Twitter, preserves all those vices. There are more than 35,000 people who block me there because I follow Jesse Singal, a journalist of whom they disapprove. There are still some clever, thoughtful, and well-informed people there — many from The Economist and the Financial Times — but you’d miss a lot if you were confined to it.
The small and deliberately obscure network Mastodon preserves something of the atmosphere of the 1990s internet — a refuge for clever misfits all over the world — but I have only ever found half a dozen people who are consistently interesting there. I’ve never touched Tiktok, Threads, or Instagram. Life’s too short. Facebook I use only to follow a witch I know and for discussions about Swedish dogs.
What’s worse, all these systems are run by American companies. The only exception is Mastodon, which is completely decentralised and so has some very nasty parts indeed. But Mastodon doesn’t matter.
Indeed, no social-media platform matters very much compared with the other consequences if Europe enters a cold war with MAGA USA, and this is fought out in digital space. I wrote last year about the experience of Nicolas Guillou, a French judge on the International Criminal Court, one of nine singled out by the Trump regime for punishment and sanctioned like a terrorist (28 November 2025). He has no bank cards, because Visa and Mastercard are American. He cannot buy anything from Amazon. Although this is not mentioned, I doubt that he can legally use Microsoft software.
Almost everything that we do online passes through Amazon’s cloud systems: a recent report to the European Parliament found that 92 per cent of Europe’s data was held on American servers. Our cars are increasingly dependent on software that is either American or Chinese, and many modern ones can be updated or bricked over the air like other internet technology. Our phones run on American software, unless we go for a Chinese alternative. British politics runs on WhatsApp groups, also owned by an American company. The British security establishment has worried for years about the involvement of Chinese electronics in our telephone networks, but our dependence on American software is almost absolute. A life without Google is very hard to imagine.
All these are levers that President Trump would not hesitate to pull if he learned of their existence. This is a far more serious threat, I think, than tariffs would be. And, after Brexit, Britain is in an exceptionally vulnerable position: unlike the European Union, we are not a market big enough for the American tech giants to fight very hard for their profits here. It is difficult to believe that all the worst consequences will happen. They probably won’t. But just to consider them is to realise what a shattering catastrophe the collapse of the American republic has been.
