Musk-owned Twitter echoes an earlier oligarch takeover of British newspapers
Elon Musk is finally ‘chief twit’, and Twitter is being placed in the pocket of the world’s richest man. This feels a little bit like the moment when The Independent, a British newspaper created in the 1980s as a rival to the country’s many tycoon-owned dailies, was bought by a Russian billionaire, except vastly more consequential since by then no one really read The Independent anyway.
- “Twitter's purpose is to serve the public conversation,” states Twitter in the first sentence of “The Twitter Rules”.
- “Journalism of the highest standard cannot easily flourish when impeded by … the political prejudices of the typical newspaper proprietor,” stated the Independent’s first editorial back in 1986.
There isn’t much money in serving the public though, so here we are, just like there wasn’t in producing journalism of the highest standard, and luckily Musk says he’s fine with that.
- “I didn’t do it to make money. I did it to help humanity, whom I love,” said Musk in a personal note to Twitter advertisers, which he tweeted to his 112 million followers. “The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square.”
That may be the case, but now that the digital square has been bought by the town’s wealthiest citizen, what should oligarchy-concerned folks do about it? Quite a few Twitter users have just upped and gone.
- “Not hanging around for whatever Elon has planned. Bye,” tweeted producer Shonda Rhimes. Her profile appears to still be active so perhaps she’s hedging her bets on that, but quite a lot of Twitter users (including me) have noticed drops in their follower numbers, so perhaps a fair few folks have followed through with their threats to leave to new pastures like Mastodon.
And quite a few Twitter employees are very concerned, even though Musk himself has denied plans to fire three-quarters of them, in order to save money.