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“If Elon Musk has his way, the effects on Twitter of his buying up the social media platform will end up being the least of our problems. To get a sense of how bad this could get, it’s instructive to look at the parallels between Musk’s Twitter acquisition and the creation of Fox News. When Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch started Fox News in the late 1990s, they envisioned the channel as a counterbalance to the rest of the supposedly liberal media, a cudgel to deploy against the news media to get coverage for manufactured controversies and right-wing misinformation. Musk views Twitter in much the same way that Murdoch and Ailes saw Fox at its inception. To Musk, social media companies haven’t just gone too far in addressing extremism, bigotry, and disinformation – they shouldn’t be addressing these issues at all. Musk’s vision of Twitter isn’t simply as a platform free from constraints, but as an instrument to counterbalance the “woke” social networks. As Twitter’s new owner, Musk will open the floodgates of hate and lies by undoing a host of very basic protections against harassment, abuse, and disinformation. There is a reason why banned users—ranging from Roger Stone and Marjorie Taylor Greene to QAnon and Infowars conspiracy theorists to white supremacists—are all celebrating this acquisition and gleefully anticipating the restoration of their accounts.”
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Elon Musk Will Use Twitter to Update Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Playbook
The second this purchase is finalized, every fascist in the world will be handed a megaphone so loud and unaccountable, they will use it to drown out every voice that isn’t their own.
This is a DISASTER for marginalized people, and a deadly weapon for autocrats.
