Last week, Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk tweeted that he was giving ‘serious thought’ to creating a new social media platform. Polling his followers, the billionaire asked whether existing social media platforms adhered to free speech principles, all the whilst referring to Twitter as a ‘de facto public town square’ that ‘undermined democracy.’
Musk has had murky relations with multiple regulators and digital platforms, especially over how he defines ‘free speech.’ Earlier this year, he tweeted a meme comparing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler, which he deleted after a public backlash. In September 2018, Musk found himself in hot water with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for making ‘false and misleading’ statements to investors via Twitter.
Unfortunately, Musk’s ‘free speech’ melodrama has company. Former US President Donald Trump also recently launched his own social media platform Truth Social, after he was banned from Twitter for inciting his followers to violence. While his platform claims to be ‘America's “Big Tent” social media platform that encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating against political ideology,’ interestingly, yet unsurprisingly, the platform has a long waitlist. The state of freedom on the platform is such that interested users can be barred from using it if the platform does not like their account name, which would indicate the platform may be more restrictive on free speech than other social media platforms.
Whilst there seems to be a trend for billionaires to have a polarising presence on social media, they have something else in common - the power to not only launch their own social media platforms, but the ability to govern and regulate them for their own benefit and in their own way.
It is a populist approach that emerges from an elite model, institutionally segregated from a democratic process. Media theorists Des Freedman calls it the control paradigm and argues that the political influence of particular ‘media moguls’ equips them with a tool to assert their own dominance. Launching their own platforms gives these billionaire populists the power to defy regulation, contribute to the concentration and monopoly of power among an already limited pool of people, and crush small competition with little or no substantive legislative action behind a ‘free speech’ façade.
This is the locus, as also argued by Elisabetta Ferrari, where technocracy and populism intersect to reinforce the misconception created by the tech world that only they can save the public from bureaucracy and truly represent the public, their will, and their voices. And questioning such elitist narratives is exercising one’s right to free speech, democratically.
Ayesha Jehangir, Postdoctoral Fellow
This was originally published in our newsletter of 1 April 2022 - Click to read the full edition here.
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