The Guardian in another article explains that they are annoyed because Musk used twitter to promote his preferred candidate.
The Guardian itself used their own platform to publicly endorse Harris.
This deja-vu of childish antics is just comical in 2024
1) The party which has been kvetching the most about being deplatformed and canceled by mainstream media and colleges etc. is now in power and in the name of promoting free speech promises to go after institutions in academia etc. that are full of their political opponents (who lean left) for “claming down on free speech and calling it disinformation”
2) One man bought Twitter and controls everything about the platform, some things definitely increase freedom of speech (eg proliferation of neo nazi and openly antisemitic viewpoints) and some of his own decisions clamp down on it (eg overnight declaring that “cis”, the opposite if “trans”, is a slur and cannot be said on Twitter anymore)
3) The same man will now be heading up D.O.G.E., the bureau of government efficiency, together with another private sectir billionaire (who got public sector money) to defund many public sector things, or at least make them more efficient
To sum up, we’ll be in the strange situation where the party in power is concerned about increasing freedom of speech (usually the counterculture wants this freedom while the ones in power want to repress dissent). We will have the world’s “most free social network” actually OWNED AND CONTROLLED by one guy, who happens to also work for the government, in fact head up a new government agency tasked with defunding others, and is a super-Fed.
People on the left will start to question the optics and unusualness of all this. Will the MAGA party (the acronym GOP seems very outdated) in good faith encourage speech against themselves, and will the owner of X, while heading up a major new agency in the federal government, also encourage loud criticism of their own activities?
Or will their algorithms — which one man will continue to ultimately control — silently (and maybe only as an emergent behavior) prioritize what they want and suppress what they don’t?
As long as Zuck controls Facebook (sorry, “Meta”), Elon controls Twitter (sorry, “X”), and a few on the top control Google, YouTube, TikTok etc. I do not see true power for the people. “Freedom of speech” is just another expression the owners and corporations co-opted and hijacked to mean “controlling a platform” and “owning an audience”.
Why do we simply donate our audience and content to these platforms? Because they have the backend software infrastructure and we don’t.
I believe that we need open source alternatives that anyone can host, that no one can own the entire network. Not even Durov. Mastodon and Matric and Bluesky are a good start. I’m working on my own too:
https://community.qbix.com/t/growing-your-community/305
And yes, it is possible for the entire ecosystem to make money serving the people with open source infrastructure, just like Wordpress, Drupal etc. Here is how it could work:
off topic, but one thing I always wonder is why the press goes along with company re-branding? If everyone knows it as Twitter or Meta, wouldn't the easiest thing be to just keep referring to it that way in your articles etc and not help the company in its massive undertaking of changing everyone's name for the product?
I mean hey, I can understand why someone like Blackwater renamed themselves to the more innocuous-sounding “Academi” LOL. But why does the media go along with it?
For the same reason they go along with other things, like covering Trump 24/7 in 2015-2016 even though they hated him. The incentives push them that way. A lot of things just go on autopilot. “This is what everyone is doing so we must too. This is the controversy so we must cover it before others do”.
I had a conversation about Capitalism and Freedom of Speech with Noam Chomsky twice on my show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_JtMSpMrOw
(Earlier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUPZ8rSESZo)
It’s an emergent behavior of the system. Here is George Carlin with a darker take than me: