We Can't Let Billionaires Control Major Communications Platforms

[Thaddeus]

[We Can’t Let Billionaires Control Major Communications Platforms[b]
Published by @VWPickard in The Nation

Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO notorious for posting asinine tweets to his 80 million–plus Twitter followers, has purchased himself a position of power within the platform itself by becoming the company’s largest shareholder.

[snip]

Indeed, Musk’s tweets contain troubling clues about his hopes for Twitter. Beyond advocating for creating an edit button on individual posts and other, more eccentric proposals, Musk has implied that Twitter should amend or abandon its content moderation policies and follow his preferred version of free speech, which should give us pause.

While Musk has described himself as a “free speech absolutist,” it’s clear that this commitment doesn’t apply to those in his employ. Under Musk’s rule, Tesla has worked to stifle dissent, including trying to silence a Black employee for coming forward with allegations of racial discrimination and firing a female engineer after she detailed a culture of “pervasive harassment” at the company. It appears that Musk’s allegiance to free speech applies only to powerful people like himself, while those working under him are forced to settle for quiet obedience.

Regardless of Musk’s dubious principles, any move to relax content moderation standards warrants legitimate concern. For example, changing the policies by which Twitter restricts or suspends accounts that cause social harm could yield more harassment, hate speech, incitement to violence, and dangerous misinformation about voting and vaccines. Twitter’s uneven adherence to its own rules has been rightly criticized, but having no rules would be a troll’s paradise—a Hobbesian hellscape of all against all, with the most vulnerable having the most to lose.

Read the rest here: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/elon-musk-twitter-board/

[BeckyDem]

1. Yep.

Horrendous consequences resulted:

Telecommunications deregulation is proceeding with dizzying speed, enabling a parade of media mergers that have concentrated the power of the press into fewer and fewer corporate hands. Because the FCC’s rulemaking process is obscure and poorly publicized, regulations are often rewritten or dropped with almost no public input.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996– essentially bought and paid for by corporate media lobbies– opened the floodgates on mergers. Ironically, consolidation has been most profound in radio, a medium ideally suited to local ownership and diverse content. The damage to radio diversity is staggering: Over 4,000 radio stations have been bought out since the Telecom Act, and minority ownership of TV stations has dropped to its lowest point since the federal government began tracking such data in 1990.
https://fair.org/take-action/action-alerts/speak-out-for-media-democracy/

[SheltieLover]

2. Yup!

[I_UndergroundPanther]

3. Billionaires and profit seeking

needs to be taken out of public services. Things people need like news,net,healthcare,schools and colleges,the post office,medicine
Food,water etc. Because as long as they control these vital resources we all need we will be beholden to them, thier agendas corruption and greed.

[zuul]

4. They failed with Parler.

Nicolas Henin (@N_Henin)

They failed with Parler.
They failed with Gettr.
They are about to fail with Truth.
They realized their only way to succeed was to grab the original: Twitter.

5:53 AM · Apr 14, 2022

Link to tweet

[2naSalit]

5. K&R

[keithbvadu2]

6. Like Fox?

[BlueWavePsych]

7. Kick