Srsly Risky Biz: Outside America, Musk's X is a foreign influence threat

Summary

Risky Bulletin Summary: "Srsly Risky Biz: Outside America, Musk's X is a Foreign Influence Threat"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Risky Bulletin
• Host/Author: risky.biz
• Episode: Srsly Risky Biz: Outside America, Musk's X is a Foreign Influence Threat
• Release Date: March 13, 2025

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Introduction

In the March 13, 2025 episode of Risky Bulletin titled "Srsly Risky Biz: Outside America, Musk's X is a Foreign Influence Threat," host Patrick Gray engages in an in-depth conversation with Tom Uren, the policy and intelligence editor at Risky Business Media. The discussion centers around the growing international concerns regarding Elon Musk's ownership of X (formerly Twitter) and its implications as a foreign influence threat, drawing parallels with debates surrounding TikTok.

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Comparing X and TikTok as Foreign Influence Vessels

Banning Calls in Liberal Democracies

Patrick Gray initiates the conversation by highlighting the increasing calls within liberal democracies, particularly the UK, to ban X. He notes the similarity in the discourse surrounding X and TikTok, both perceived as platforms that can be exploited for foreign propaganda and misinformation.

Patrick Gray [00:00]: "One of the big things you covered was growing calls in liberal democracies around the world to at least talk about banning the social media website formerly known as Twitter X."

Tom Uren on TikTok’s Threat

Tom Uren elaborates on his longstanding concerns about TikTok, emphasizing its potential as a conduit for Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence within the United States. He argues that TikTok could manipulate political discourse, posing a significant national security threat.

Tom Uren [01:31]: "The strongest argument for the US to ban TikTok is that it's a potential vessel for Communist Party influence in the US."

X Under Elon Musk’s Ownership

Contrasting TikTok, Uren points out that many of the issues associated with TikTok are already manifesting on X under Elon Musk’s stewardship. He expresses concern over Musk's ability to amplify his own profile and bypass traditional content gatekeepers, leading to the widespread dissemination of misinformation and extremist content.

Tom Uren [02:14]: "Everything that you worry about TikTok potentially doing is happening right now, today, and has been happening for, well, pretty much ever since Elon Musk took it over."

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Elon Musk’s Influence and Platform Dynamics

Amplification of Musk’s Voice

Uren discusses how Musk's presence on X has significantly altered the platform's dynamics. He highlights Musk's ability to "bypass checks and balances," allowing his content to reach a vast audience with minimal oversight.

Tom Uren [03:23]: "His account bypasses checks and balances that try and make sure that what you are showing to people is interesting."

Boosting of Fringe and Extremist Content

Patrick Gray shares his personal experience as a non-X user, noting how Musk’s activity surfaces prominently across users' feeds, often necessitating personal measures like blocking Musk to mitigate exposure to his content. He underscores the platform's role in amplifying not just conservative viewpoints but also overtly extremist content, likening the platform's influence to using "a sledgehammer."

Patrick Gray [03:56]: "Whenever he tweets it like shows up in everybody's feeds because he's engineered it to be that way... it is just so off obvious as you wrote in your piece, it's as subtle as a sledgehammer."

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Global Perspectives and Policy Implications

Foreign Governments’ Stance on X

Uren draws parallels between the rationale for banning TikTok and the emerging arguments against X. He explains that foreign governments, much like those that have implemented foreign media ownership laws, view X as a platform that could propagate unwanted propaganda and misinformation detrimental to their societal fabric.

Tom Uren [04:54]: "From a foreign government's perspective, why would you put up with that?... It's like a publisher and so why would you accept a foreign publishing house publishing all sorts of propaganda."

Impact of US Policy Shifts on Global Alliances

Patrick Gray observes that the United States' shifting stance towards its traditional allies has influenced global perceptions of both the US and Elon Musk. This decoupling has opened the door for discussions about banning X to become part of the "Overton window," making such debates more politically acceptable than before.

Patrick Gray [08:30]: "Discussions of a ban are now within the Overton window... even a few months ago that was just not the case."

Deterioration of US-Allied Relations

Uren reflects on the deteriorating relationship between the US and its allies, suggesting that the previously favorable trade and cooperation agreements have unraveled. This shift has led to a reevaluation of previously accepted compromises, such as the non-restriction of US tech companies like X in foreign markets.

Tom Uren [09:22]: "There was a deal... now it's re evaluating what we gave up to get that deal is now on the table."

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Rob Joyce’s Critique and Implications for the NSA

Rob Joyce’s Concerns

The conversation shifts to Rob Joyce, a former special advisor to President Trump and former cybersecurity director at the NSA. Uren discusses Joyce's critical remarks directed at the Trump administration’s handling of the NSA, particularly concerning arbitrary firings and their detrimental impact on the agency's workforce and operational integrity.

Tom Uren [11:21]: "Interrupting those pipelines, you're actually sort of cutting a hole across the organization in a slice where you've got this gap in skills that over time will cause problems."

Impact on Intelligence Workforce

Uren emphasizes the unique challenges faced by intelligence agencies, such as the specialized training pipelines that cannot be easily replicated or filled by external hires. Disruptions to these pipelines jeopardize both the short-term functionality and the long-term viability of the agency's workforce.

Tom Uren [12:26]: "If you make that deal less attractive by removing job security, I think that's also a problem."

Uncertainty of Future Missions

He further warns that under the Trump administration, there is uncertainty regarding the mission and objectives of intelligence agencies, which historically had clear mandates focused on countering traditional adversaries.

Tom Uren [14:07]: "Under the Trump administration, you don't actually know what the mission is."

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Conclusion

In this episode of Risky Bulletin, Patrick Gray and Tom Uren provide a comprehensive analysis of the international ramifications of Elon Musk’s control over X, positioning it alongside TikTok as a significant foreign influence threat. They delve into the complexities of global media governance, the shifting geopolitical landscape, and the internal challenges facing U.S. intelligence agencies. The discussion underscores the intricate interplay between technology platforms, national security, and international policy, highlighting the evolving nature of digital influence in contemporary geopolitics.

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Notable Quotes:

• Patrick Gray [03:56]: "it is just so off obvious as you wrote in your piece, it's as subtle as a sledgehammer."

• Tom Uren [12:26]: "If you make that deal less attractive by removing job security, I think that’s also a problem."

• Tom Uren [14:07]: "Under the Trump administration, you don't actually know what the mission is."

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For more insights and detailed analyses, subscribe to Risky Biz's newsletter available on Risky Biz.

Transcript

[Patrick Gray]

Foreign and welcome to Seriously Risky Business, the podcast we do here at Risky Biz hq, which is all about cyber policy and intelligence. My name's Patrick Gray and we will be chatting with Tom Uren in just a moment. He is, of course, our policy and intelligence editor here at Risky Business Media, and we'll be talking through his newsletter, which goes out once a week, and you can subscribe to that one by going to Risky Biz. Before we get started, I'd like to thank the William and Flora Hewlett foundation for supporting Tom's work and also Lawfare Media for their support. They, of course, syndicate Tom's work, so you can read it on Lawfare Media. If you don't want to read it in your inbox, the choice is yours. So, of course, we're going to talk through a few things now, Tom, and we've just wrapped up the edit for this, for this week's show. And one of the big things you covered was growing calls in liberal democracies around the world to at least talk about banning the social media website formerly known as Twitter X. So there have been some credible commentators in the UK who are saying, look, we just need to get rid of this thing. What's striking about all of this, though, is the similarities between the discussion around this and the discussion of TikTok as a foreign owned, you know, foreign controlled social media website that. That presents a threat. Right. Particularly around things like propaganda.

[Tom Uren]

Yeah. So that is quite striking. So the. What made me interested in this is there's a couple of pieces that have come out, commentators saying we should ban X. And I've written about TikTok over the last few years, and to me, the strongest argument for the US to ban TikTok is that it's a potential vessel for Communist Party influence in the us. The Communist Party could at any moment pull the levers and swing the political discourse in the US in whichever way it wants.

[Patrick Gray]

Yes, potential abuse is alarming.

[Tom Uren]

Yeah. And but when you look at X, everything that you worry about TikTok potentially doing is happening right now, today, and has been happening for, well, pretty much ever since Elon Musk took it over.

[Patrick Gray]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've seen the Nazis come back and we just see a lot of misinformation, a lot of really fringe stuff, which I guess in the United States isn't necessarily regarded as fringe anymore. But to those of us outside America, it's crazy.

[Tom Uren]

Yeah, that's right. And so it's. It sort of looking at it through the lens of why TikTok is a problem. It's just super clear that yes, this is a problem. Governments should probably do something about it. So some of it. Well, in fact is it. All of it is just about Elon Musk himself. So the. He has gotten his profile to be basically amplified. I think they, in Twitter they call it the sort of power user multiplier or something like that. And it applies just to Elon Musk.

[Patrick Gray]

Yeah.

[Tom Uren]

And so his account bypasses checks and balances that try and make sure that what you are showing to people is interesting. And so he bypasses all the gatekeepers and just. I think the figure I saw is that it's a thousand fold multiplier effect. So whenever you open up X like he's there all the time.

[Patrick Gray]

I mean, you know what's interesting about this, and we talked about this during the edit, is you're not actually an X user. Right. So. Whereas I still. You used to.

[Tom Uren]

Yeah, used to.

[Patrick Gray]

So I still lurk just because there's people who post stuff there that I want to see. But sometimes, you know, I just have to like turn it off kind of thing because the stuff that flows through the, you know, sort of tailored for you feed, it's not just Musk stuff. Like I literally had to block him and a lot of people have because of this thing where just anytime he tweets it like shows up in everybody's feeds because he's engineered it to be that way so you can block him and you can deal with that problem. But it's the stuff, stuff that is boosted by that platform now, which isn't just, you know, to be clear, this isn't just conservative perspectives. I mean the outright Nazi stuff is voluminous and it's boosted. It's really, it is really boosted anything, you know, anything sort of that's not, that does not really get boosted. You might see a little bit of it, but it is just so off obvious as you wrote in your piece, it's as subtle as a sledgehammer.

[Tom Uren]

Yeah, yeah. And so from a foreign government's perspective, why would you put up with that? What's the like in most countries you have foreign media ownership laws and I think basically it's. I guess we've made the analogy of TikTok before. It's like a publisher and so why would you accept a foreign publishing house publishing all sorts of propaganda, misinformation, promoting things you just don't believe in as a society in general.

[Patrick Gray]

One things that are divisive and can cause problems. I mean, you know, you point out in this, you know, you quote a Guardian article from January which is, you know, looking at how he's endorsed the far right party, the AfD in Germany. He's been targeting the British Labor Party as well, really hammering them, saying that the government there is protecting the interests of immigrants in Britain over those of native born citizens. I mean, it's his typical sort of, you know, anti immigrant shtick. We also saw issues in Brazil where he had refused to suspend accounts of people who were involved in a attempted overthrow of the government there, which led to X temporarily at least being banned within Brazil. And you know, he said they would never back down. And of course they backed down after about a week, week and a half or something and service was restored. But you know, this, I think there's a really, it's interesting for us as an Australian publication because I don't think people inside the United States quite understand, first of all, how this sort of stuff plays outside of the US that the United States attitudes towards free speech are kind of outliers as well. I don't think Americans quite understand that, most of them anyway. And just, you know, how much this platform is now being seen as a sort of fascist propaganda tool. I just don't think they get it.

[Tom Uren]

The other thing that occurs to me is that it's very closely associated with the Trump administration because of Musk. And the Trump administration is not popular anywhere except maybe Russia.

[Patrick Gray]

Well, and the United States, where he's still piling. Okay, you know, yeah.

[Tom Uren]

And so that association with maybe malign. Malign is probably not too strong. Malign political influence on your own democracy is a serious problem. Now Elon, he's an American, he can have an opinion. He can buy Twitter and shout that opinion, whatever. But it's different when you're a citizen of a country, I think. Well, it is different. And so from a European or a German or an Australian, like, why should Elon have an outside outsized voice? He's got lots of other ways to express his opinion. We don't need to have it shoveled down upon us on a social media platform. And so I think that's the argument and I think it makes a whole lot of sense. That's the same argument that was run for TikTok, one of the arguments. And the US Congress passed a law to at least attempt to try and mitigate that risk. Whether anything substantial whether happened to TikTok, who knows. But I think the fact that the law got passed indicates that there's, you know, the US Congress recognized that problem, this is the exact same problem just for everyone else outside the U.S. yeah.

[Patrick Gray]

And I think the, the most interesting part of what you've written this week, I think, is that this really wasn't on the agenda until very recently. I think, you know, just everything that's happening with the United States kind of decoupling from its traditional allies and acting. The way it's acting has sort of changed the way people see the United States and in turn, the way they see Musk and his, you know, viewpoints, let's just put it that way. So I think, yeah, just the, the change to the way people, policymakers are perceiving the United States on the global stage. How has made this. I think there's a line we've got in the newsletter about how this is now. Discussions of a ban are now within the Overton window. You know, they're now within the window of acceptable political discourse. Whereas even a few months ago that was just not the case.

[Tom Uren]

I think there is, to me, at least there's a strong sense of there was a deal. Part of the deal was that the US Would be a good ally, other countries would accept trade terms that, say, benefited U.S. copyright holders, and we wouldn't ban or think of banning US Tech companies. It was kind of a quid pro quo. I think that deal's just gone up in flames. And so it's, I think, re evaluating what we gave up to get that deal is now on the table.

[Patrick Gray]

Yeah, yeah. It's, as they say, may you live in interesting times. Now, another thing that you've taken a look at this week is following up on comments by Rob Joyce to the Chinese Communist. To the Chinese Communist Party, to the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party in the US Congress. Of course, Rob Joyce was a special advisor to the US President Trump term one. He also ran the cybersecurity directorate at nsa. He's a very well person in cybersecurity and he's come out and he's really heavily criticized the Trump administration for its, you know, essentially arbitrary firings in nsa. Now, we covered this with him on the weekly show yesterday where he was a special guest co host. And thanks again to him for that. So you've written up some of the comments he made at the, at the House committee and also some of the comments he made to us. But I wanted to ask you for your perspective on this as someone who worked for a signals intelligence agency for a very long time, you know, what's your immediate feeling on just how damaging this is? Because Joyce's opinion seems to be that this is actually really quite bad, at least for the, for the medium, you know, not just the short term, but at least the medium term of the, of the nsa. You know, what's your take here, Tom, on what all this means and what it's going to do to the workforce?

[Tom Uren]

Yeah. So I was thinking as I was going into writing this piece, what makes an intelligence agency different from any other federal government agency? Is there a magic difference to say, working in any other bureaucracy? And I think that there is in that many of the things you do in intelligence agencies are just somewhat, if you're working inside them, you would call them special. If you're outside them, you might say that they're unique. And if you hate intelligence agencies, you would say that they're illegal. But the point is that there's a lot of things you do inside that just don't get done outside in the real world. Sometimes that's because what you're doing would be illegal if you were doing it in the real world. Sometimes it's because they've invested so much in staying ahead of the public state of the art that it's like, like no one outside knows what's going on. And so you can't learn those skills.

[Patrick Gray]

Yes. You can't just hire graduates who know how to do this stuff, I guess, is the point.

[Tom Uren]

Yeah, yeah. So when I started, someone said to me on the recruitment panel, I think they said something like, there is no university degree for signals intelligence. And that is slightly different in cyber, but I think broadly it applies. And so there are these quite long pipelines of in house training development programs that occur. And I was kind of looking back at my own career and it feels like it's. Now that I'm old and wise, it feels like it takes you two or three years to start to actually be productive. I mean, that's probably a slight exaggeration, but the thing is, when you interrupt those pipelines, you're actually sort of cutting a hole across the organization in a slice where you've got this gap in skills that over time will cause problems. Will cause problems. And so I think there's that like the immediate short term effect, but there's also the longer term effect of if you make those pipelines, like taking a job there, risky part of the deal is that you lose. It just makes the job a whole lot less attractive. So a lot of the people who go into those organizations do so because they recognize that the work will be very interesting. I'll get to do something that will help the country, but I'll probably get paid less than I could in the private sector. And so if you make that deal less attractive by removing job security, I think that's also a problem.

[Patrick Gray]

Yeah, I mean, Rob talked about that as well, which is that. Yeah, I mean, would you want to sign up at this point? I guess is, is the, is the question right when the job security is just not there, are you prepared to eat the rest of the, you know, what sandwich in order to go and do that job? And the answer would be probably not.

[Tom Uren]

I mean, I think the other thing is that under the Trump administration, you don't actually know what the mission is.

[Patrick Gray]

Yeah.

[Tom Uren]

In the past, it was quite clear that you would be prosecuting, I guess I would call them traditional adversaries. I don't know what the mission will be in the future.

[Patrick Gray]

Yeah, grim, actually. But we're going to wrap it up there. It's a short one this week, but. Tom, you're in. Thank you so much for your wonderful work as always this week. And again, people can go to Risky Biz and just scroll down to where it says newsletters, and you can find both of our newsletters there and you can subscribe to them. A pleasure to chat to you as always, my friend. And we'll do it again next week.

[Tom Uren]

Thanks, Patrick. It.