Elon Musk and Twitter

 

Elon Musk and Twitter

 Unbeknown to most, Google and Facebook own many of the popular U.S. based social media platforms.  Facebook owns WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.  Google (Alphabet) owns YouTube. - Twitter, Telegram, Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit have been independent.  Six major social media companies, including TikTok are own by Chinese interests.

 When modern social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and others posit themselves as representing the digital world public square, they cannot degenerate into the private leftist fiefdoms of Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg.  They may be private companies, not subject to government freedom of speech laws, and unfairly protected by Section 230 of the “Communications Decency Act”, but they should be should be an open forum if they are to represent themselves as a “public square”.  

 To the chagrin of the left-leaning big tech algorithm makers that filter out non-leftist opinions, along comes unpredictable libertarian Elon Musk, with $44 billion, who promises to clean up Twitter’s algorithms.  Woe and alas, but all manner of pornography like truly balanced free speech in 140/280 characters will be allowed into Twitter to poison the minds of some of the sheep that write the “hard news”!

 This is a good article about why Twitter, which is relatively small in the panoply of the social media giants, is as important as Musk finds it.

 https://www.socialmediamagazine.org/twitter-powerful-influential-social-media-platforms-world/

 Ray Gruszecki

April 25, 2022