Although it’s hard to gauge how serious tech billionaire Elon Musk’s $43 billion bid for social media platform Twitter is, it raises enormous questions not only for Twitter users but for all democratic societies. Musk’s jocular, will-I-won’t-I approach to buying the entire platform, signals the problem.
Extraordinary, unprecedented profits from technology-related companies have created a handful of individuals so breathtakingly wealthy that, solo, they can take control of global communication platforms and media companies.
Among them, Amazon's Jeff Bezos now owns the Washington Post, while Salesforce founder and chief executive Marc Benioff has Time Magazine. Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple's Steve Jobs, owns a major stake in The Atlantic magazine.
Biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the Los Angeles Times and other US newspapers. Although self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” Musk trumpets that his (possible) purchase would be all about ensuring free speech and democracy, even in the US “free speech” is not an absolute right. Nor is there anything like a global standard for “free speech”, which has both cultural and legal variations.
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The phrase has also been deliberately co-opted to legitimate acts of bullying and hate speech, defamation, misinformation, incitement to violence, and other offences. Which “free speech” version is Musk’s “free speech”? One man owning the whole platform is more likely to exacerbate than resolve these difficult issues.
And then there’s the potential conflicts of interest. Musk is a businessman already at loggerheads with the US financial regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), over public, business-impacting statements he has made – usually on Twitter. Owning the platform, and having the ability to decide who else uses it, raises concerns about who benefits, especially when Musk already perceives Twitter as a place to remake rules to suit his own “free speech” definition.
Of course, the creation of the big technology platforms begat some of today's wealthiest individuals, including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who own YouTube. There's Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey too. One might ask what's the difference in Twitter passing from the ownership of one tech billionaire to another tech billionaire?
That’s actually the point. Tech oligarchs now control a significant portion of our communications infrastructure. Musk’s comments last week indicate an intent to remake that infrastructure to his liking.
Now more than ever, we understand the implications and the risks of having billionaires control national and international communication channels. As more tech oligarchs snap them up, we risk ending up with the versions of democracy only big money can buy.