The Allison Pearson saga is nothing if not a morality tale about the modern media. Among its many learnings are that calling a group of people of colour holding a flag on social media “Jew haters” is likely to get you into trouble. Apparently, though, it can also make you best mates with the world’s richest man.

On Monday night, almost exactly a year after the Telegraph writer posted her response to a picture of police officers alongside two men holding a flag on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, she was offering her “huge thanks” to the site’s owner, Elon Musk, for his support. After he responded, she dubbed the billionaire with a powerful new job in the US government her “new bestie ♥️” in a post to her 191,500 followers, including, in her words, “hundreds of black and Asian followers”.

Before explaining how we got here, to a situation where a stupid and since deleted tweet became a standard bearer for free speech across much of our media, it seems wise to pause and take a breath. Before adding another body to what has become a media pile-on, let me make clear that I believe free speech is a human right, fundamental to our democracy. I am also generally against heavy-handed police actions, including knocking on journalists’ doors over a deleted social media post. Yet I also believe it is wrong and indeed racist to abuse a group of men on the basis of the colour of their skin and an (incorrect) assumption about their nationality. To hold this opinion – that racists and misogynists should not have carte blanche to say what they like under the banner of free speech – does not make me part of cancel culture, but a civilised one.

Yet here we are on the frontline of the culture war, fighting the good fight over a bad tweet. And some fight it is. “My week of hell shows that the Britain we love and trust has gone,” is Pearson’s page 1 promoted, hyperbolic, lament in the Telegraph today.

It started with a visit by police on Remembrance Sunday to Pearson’s house after a complaint was made that the writer had incited racial hatred. She claims that police did not tell her what the tweet in question was.

Last Wednesday, instead of leading on the archbishop of Canterbury quitting in the wake of a sex abuse crisis, the Telegraph splashed on “Telegraph writer in ‘Kafkaesque’ hate crime inquiry”. The Pearson saga then continued to lead its front page for the next four days. Former prime minister Boris Johnson used his column in the Daily Mail to advise his successor to “police the streets, not the tweets”. Even BBC Radio 4’s PM programme piled in with a discussion about where the bar should be set for non-crime hate incidents, before Essex police published a partial transcript of bodycam footage, pointing out that she was being investigated for an actual allegation of an actual crime under English law, namely potentially “inciting racial hatred”.

After a Guardian exclusive revealed the details of what seems to be the tweet at the centre of the saga on Friday, some X users spread a claim that the tweet had been posted by a bot, rather than Pearson herself. But the tweet is alleged to have been Pearson’s, and an account using her name appears to have mirrored the post from Pearson’s account.

When the original battle between writers and the state over free speech took off 400 years ago, it was the government that had all the power. Now politicians appear to be too afraid of the online mob to want much to do with it. Keir Starmer was halfway to Rio de Janeiro for the G20 summit when he was asked directly about the saga. In a non specific reply, he muttered something about the police needing to “concentrate on what matters most to their communities”.

When Pearson went public with her police run-in last week she asked: “Who decides where you set the bar for what’s offensive?” The answer appears to be the owners of social media platforms, the arbiters of what is considered racist and inflammatory. Musk suggested, when he bought Twitter for $44bn, his aim was restoring “free speech”. By Monday night, Pearson was asking her new best friend to buy the Telegraph, still up for sale 18 months after its previous owners failed to pay their debts: “Would you like to buy a British newspaper? Excellent journalists, fine values, anti-woke, pro sanity and humour – needs caring owner.”

When John Milton wrote the seminal text in support of free speech 400 years ago, he named it Areopagitica after the hill in Athens – itself named after the god Ares – on which stood a court that handled important public business. In our current social media broligarchy, the world seems increasingly governed by a handful of very rich men, with Musk as Ares supporting those who believe they can say anything they like. The result is a “who shouts loudest” social media culture that is killing trust in mainstream media, especially among young people.

It’s a playbook that encourages abuse, and most of us don’t want to play any more. Musk supported Pearson by posting: “This needs to stop.” He was right, if not in the way he believed.

• Jane Martinson is a Guardian columnist

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