The British rape scandal now making international news has actually been a story for years, well before Elon Musk posted about it on his X account. Britain’s home secretary, Suella Braverman, filmmaker Tommy Robinson, whistleblower Maggie Oliver, and others have long been working to raise public awareness about the crimes. Plenty of Rotherham and Rochdale victims and their parents have filed police reports and begged for justice. Nothing changed until Mr. Musk’s post.

The impact one influential person can have when his attention is trained on an important issue and everyone else’s attention is trained on him is extraordinary. Sometimes it is extraordinarily good, as in this case. Mr. Musk may well have saved another generation of girls from a pedophilia free-for-all in a Western society cowed by political correctness.

It isn’t his only achievement on behalf of society. In just the last two and a half years, he has also opened the Twitter Files and exposed government censorship; endorsed President Trump after the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt last July, boosting the campaign; and derailed a bloated congressional spending bill with a few comments and a clever photo on his X account.

Influencers are useful when they don’t hate America or humanity. This isn’t always the case. Not too long ago our country was allowing itself to be influenced by people who wanted to mask toddlers on playgrounds and defund the police. We should be careful, though, not to become too dependent on any one person, no matter how capable, for cues on what to care about.

We have to keep our own antennae sharp. Mr. Musk may at times seem superhuman, but he isn’t. Sometimes he will be wrong, and sometimes he won’t have the bandwidth to address everything that needs addressing. He does have a few day jobs and 12 children.

Lately, it feels as though we have been experiencing our own modern version of the biblical 10 plagues: rivers of blood in the streets of Germany and New Orleans, strange fogs filled with hail-like substances blanketing American cities, drones appearing like swarms of locusts in the skies around the globe, and warnings about a livestock disease that threatens our food supply.

That’s four out of 10 in the last month alone. What will we do if the frogs appear over Presidents Day weekend while Mr. Musk is vacationing on a remote island without Starlink connectivity and is unable to alert us on X? Will we notice?

The kind of hero-worship our culture heaps on its “influencers” can breed complacency. It is easy to let others sort through the firehose of information out there for us, especially when they do it well. But we should be emulating the people we designate as our moral and ethical guideposts, not using them as excuses for why we didn’t see what was already right in front of us. There are no surrogates for our responsibilities.

Back in 2023, when high-profile donors began withdrawing their financial support from universities that failed to protect students on campus from antisemitic harassment and abuse, one of the leaders of the movement at the University of Pennsylvania was thanked for his tireless leadership by an appreciative fellow alumnus. His wife, standing nearby, smiled and said, “Everyone has a role to play.”  

Maybe Elon Musk should post that on his X account while everyone is paying attention to him.