I posted on how Twitter has become a sewer under Musk. Today, rather than continuing the complaint, I'll look at the solution.
One of the lazier ideas in modern tech politics is that global platforms somehow sit above national law. It is a comforting fiction, especially for platform owners, because it removes the nuisance of accountability while preserving all the benefits of reach.
X’s problem is not that it is American. It is that it wants to operate everywhere while answering nowhere. When regulation looms, it wraps itself in free speech. When profits roll in, it is perfectly happy to take British users, British data, and British money. Absolutism when challenged, sovereignty when billed.
Most existing proposals respond to this by chasing a mirage. They talk about regulating global reach through a global regulatory framework. That framework does not exist. It never has. There is no global legislature, no shared criminal law, no agreed rules on elections, speech, child protection, or sexual harm, and no enforcement mechanism democracies would trust or autocracies would accept. The idea that such a system could be built is fantasy. Almost impossible in theory, entirely impossible in practice.
That vacuum is precisely what Elon Musk exploits. He invokes American free-speech culture everywhere, monetises globally, and then denounces any national intervention as censorship. The trick only works because the alternative being offered is incoherent.
There is also a less noble motive at work. Musk does not merely want a platform. He wants reach. He wants his worldview, grievances, and political messaging to flow frictionlessly into every jurisdiction, including the UK, without local law, local standards, or local accountability getting in the way. In plain terms, he wants to pollute the UK – and, ideally, the rest of the world – with his propaganda, while calling any attempt to restrain it “censorship”.
That matters for another reason people are oddly reluctant to name. This flow of political messaging is also a route around UK election spending and campaigning laws. British parties and donors operate under strict limits and transparency rules. A foreign billionaire using his own platform to amplify preferred narratives, attack opponents, and shape debate faces none of those constraints. Influence without declaration. Spending without limits. Campaigning without accountability.
The solution is not to ban platforms or police opinions. It is to stop pretending the global can be governed as a single legal space.
A UK instance of X, for UK users, operating under UK law. Verifiable registration, not public naming, just a real person in a real place, subject to the same standards that already apply to broadcasters, publishers, banks, gambling firms, and telecoms. Safeguards by design. Clear accountability. Regulators with teeth rather than press releases.
Alongside it, the American system continues exactly as it does now. US norms, US tolerances, US risk appetite. Any UK user who wants that environment can access it freely, knowingly, and as a foreign user under American rules. No one is silenced. No one is trapped. Choice remains intact.
The crucial point is not technical separation but attribution.
If content appears in the UK system, it must be there because a UK-registered user put it there. If someone chooses to cross-post material from the American system into the UK space, that is a conscious act. They become the publisher in law. Responsibility is personal, traceable, and enforceable. No algorithmic fog. No plausible deniability. No hiding behind scale.
That applies equally to political messaging. If influence is exerted inside a UK-regulated space, it is subject to UK rules. The offshore megaphone disappears. The back door around election law closes.
At this point, critics usually say this would “break the internet”. It would not. It already exists, in plain sight, in almost every other global industry.
This is exactly how Amazon works. Amazon is a global brand, but not a single legal marketplace. Amazon UK operates under UK consumer law, UK tax law, UK product safety rules, and UK courts. Amazon US operates under US law. Products legal in one country but illegal in another simply do not appear. Users can shop abroad if they wish, but they do so under foreign rules. Amazon does not cry censorship when this happens. It treats it as compliance. Boring, administrative, unglamorous compliance.
Social media has been indulged with a legal exceptionalism no other sector enjoys. Applying the same jurisdictional logic does not threaten free speech. It merely ends frictionless amplification without liability.
If Musk refused to engage or simply chose not to change anything, the outcome would still be straightforward. Continued UK market access would be conditional on compliance. Payment processing, app-store distribution, and commercial services would follow the law, not his ideology. A UK-regulated instance would be offered on clear terms. If he declined, the result would not be censorship or martyrdom, but voluntary exit from a market he chose not to operate in lawfully.
Borders do not need to be walls. Doors are fine. But if you carry something through the door, you do not get to deny you were holding it. That is not censorship. It is adulthood.
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