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Elon Musk's attempt to buy Twitter and turn it into a private corporation appears to have succeeded. The real action starts now. Musk's acquisition exposes the Big Digital media complex to unwelcome and unwelcome competition, threatening to loosen its near-total control over information and opinion. Twitter has played an important role in a media landscape that has prohibited competitors and participants from the digital arena based on progressive criteria such as wokeness, political allegiance, and adherence to official state mandates and narratives.
The response to the Twitter takeover by the arbiters of acceptable expression has been as hysterical as it has been swift. The New York Times, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Media Matters for America, members of the establishment professoriate, and other “experts” have rushed to fortify the defensive forces against free speech.
Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, described the sale of Twitter to Mr. Musk as
a victory for disinformation and the people who peddle it. Musk could unleash a wave of toxicity and harassment and undo Twitter’s efforts to increase quality engagement and make its platform safer for users….
This potential deal is about much more than the future of Twitter. A sale to Elon Musk without any conditions will pollute the entire information ecosystem by opening the floodgate of hate and lies. Twitter’s board needs to take this into account now before the deal is done.
Carusone is correct about one thing, notwithstanding the special clamoring for safe spaces. More than Twitter's future is at stake in this agreement. As if Musk's actual nature wasn't already clear, the Twitter board's earlier attempt to thwart his seizure of the firm with a poison pill showed the Big Tech cartel member's true nature. It hasn't operated as a for-profit, free-market rival, but rather as an integral part of a carefully curated monopolistic information bubble that it has helped to develop and sustain, and within which it hasn't had to compete.
The establishment gatekeepers have been irritated by Musk's commitment to free speech, which they see as a "threat to democracy." Professor of communication and history Nolan Higdon of California State East Bay said Musk's acquisition makes "democracy less and less likely to work as it's planned," referring to Twitter's state functions. Democracy here refers to the predetermined dominance of a specific "democratic" ideology rather than equal representation in the public realm. The imperatives of "diversity, equity, and inclusion" define this ideology, which are expressed in terms of accepted and protected identities and politics.
Human rights organizations are concerned that Musk's devotion to free speech may jeopardize allegedly marginalized identity groups, who will be affected by other people's speech if Twitter's restricted algorithms are overridden. "Regardless of who controls Twitter," stated Deborah Brown, a digital rights researcher and campaigner at Human Rights Watch, "the company has human rights responsibilities to respect the rights of people who use the site all over the world." Small and large changes to its policies, features, and algorithms can have disproportionate and often fatal consequences."
The claim that speech can “harm” others of its own accord is by now the typical pretense of the special snowflake totalitarian for shutting down the speech of those deemed intolerable. Meanwhile, the New York Times relentlessly smears Musk and with FT has announced a timely exposé on the automobile mogul. And rumor has it that woke advertisers may orchestrate a full-scale boycott of Twitter.
But there's a lot more at stake than taming rogue opinion or punishing an allegedly renegade businessman like Musk. Big digital businesses such as Twitter have taken over oversight and control tasks that were previously reserved for governments. These responsibilities have been assigned to corporate properties such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube, and others, thus making them state agents while increasing the state's power and penetration. The structuring of the political field is one of these governmental duties.
Twitter has operated as a political-state apparatus—a propaganda, censorship, and (dis)information agent for the state, the state defined by Henry Hazlitt as “the clique in power.” Allowing one of these major assets to fall into the “wrong” hands jeopardizes those functions and casts new doubt on the regime’s ability to squash dissent and control the population.
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