TWITTER LAST MAN SITTING TV

None of these cultural, professional, and regulatory elements applies to today’s social media.

TWITTER LAST MAN SITTING TV

And broadcast TV stations, which have had to operate in the public interest to maintain government-issued licenses, traditionally ran independent newsrooms. The most influential papers separated their business and editorial operations. But the newspapers and television stations passed down as inheritances through wealthy families, or bought and sold like sports teams, had some dampers built in that resisted the ideological sway of their owners.

That a single person could own a center of speech has plenty of historical precedent, which might make an instance like this one seem no big deal. The underlying vulnerability is that our global town squares, in part by historical accident, have either been parochial since their beginnings or been susceptible to becoming so when a public company may be taken private in a leveraged buyout. Should someone as willfully eccentric as Elon Musk take over Twitter, that sole private ownership will place in dazzling relief the power of one person to shape millions of people’s perceptions and opinions. Propaganda can work, and when it does, it serves the interests of its creators rather than of those who believe it and then act upon it. And this can occur in ways both direct and subtle-not just using the platform to knowingly tell lies, but also carefully elevating individual purported truths to paint a picture that amounts to a lie. In the case of private ownership, harnessing a powerful platform to a single person’s preconceived political agenda risks misinforming the public, with no mechanism for an internal check or pushback. Understanding each of these dangers can point us toward a third option. The risk of public ownership of a public square is that, given social media’s innumerable and inevitable controls over which speech to favor, those in government with oversight could unduly exercise that power over public speech-exactly the situation that the First Amendment was drafted to prevent. The risk of private ownership of the public square is that one person’s views could end up privileged over all others. For these companies to be held in completely private ownership creates real risks, no matter who the owner is. These platforms aren’t just offering run-of-the-mill merchandise and services, as most other businesses do they carry and shape incalculable quantities of civic speech that can set the agenda for traditional media. While Facebook’s parent, Meta, is a public company, when Facebook itself went public a decade ago, founder Mark Zuckerberg retained his power as CEO to fire the board, rather than the other way around. If Musk’s purchase goes through, it would mean that two very significant pieces of the world’s digital speech infrastructure, Twitter and Facebook, are each entirely in a single person’s hands. That very unpredictability reveals issues beyond the evolving soap opera of a high-profile corporate acquisition. His various pronouncements have been so vague, and his behavior across his other enterprises so impulsive and mercurial, that it’s a mug’s game to forecast what he’d do were Twitter to be fully in his possession.ĭerek Thompson: Elon Musk buying Twitter is weird, chaotic, and a little bit awesome Bezos concluded not.)Īlthough it’s fair to ask these questions, it’s hard to see how anyone, possibly including Musk himself, can reliably predict what Musk will do if he becomes Twitter’s sole owner. Is it a vanity play that would allow Musk to surprise the platform’s users with new features on a given day’s whim? Or a business play to turn Twitter into a more assiduous targeted-advertising vehicle? Or a political play whose purpose is to proselytize Musk’s ideological views or, through such singular acts as re-platforming Donald Trump, to influence the outcome of the next presidential election? (Fellow centibillionaire Jeff Bezos asked aloud whether Musk’s interests in maintaining Tesla’s good graces in China could give that country leverage over a Musk-owned Twitter an interesting question from the man who owns both Amazon and The Washington Post.

Elon Musk’s on-again, off-again takeover bid for Twitter has spurred questions about what will happen if the deal goes through.

Twitter last man sitting