Author Topic: Elon Musk  (Read 17989 times)

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Offline Black Dog

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Re: Elon Musk
« Reply #90 on: April 26, 2022, 11:20:30 am »
That's the problem, all the major platforms and much of media is either owned by or being gobbled up by mega billionaires. I don't know how anyone can think that is a good thing, or good for free speech.

There's a segment of people on the right who are pretty up front about their desire to replace democracy with, essentially, a dictatorship of rich tech bros.

The Politics of Tech Oligarchy

Quote
Twitter is a notoriously bad business and Musk’s project is explicitly political: he says he wants to restore “free speech” to the platform, through the loosening of content moderation policies. Tech oligarchs, like Musk, Thiel, and Marc Andreesen, resent the control of the content moderation on the social media platforms by what they see as overly “woke” members of the professional-managerial class in both the media and in the lower-ranking staffs of the tech companies themselves. Unimpeachable in principle, in practice “free speech” would likely mean a return to the platform of the kind of trolling that dominated the space in 2015-2016, during Trump’s election. There would probably be an increase in harassment of left-leaning journalists and activists and a general “flooding of the zone with ****.”

Figures on the far right, like Tucker Carlson and the Claremont Institute’s chief Ryan Williams were already reveling in the news. The right wing’s use of social media for marshaling McCarthyite demagogic campaigns is already meeting with some success, like for instance with Chris Rufo’s assaults on “Critical Race Theory” and L.G.B.T rights. In the absence of content moderation, the ferocity of such mob activity could step up.
« Last Edit: April 26, 2022, 11:22:43 am by Black Dog »