It’s becoming increasingly clear with every passing day that Elon Musk is converting Twitter from a messaging app to a personal soapbox.
He’s been firing Twitter employees who dared to criticize him. It’s his company now, and he can do that, although whether he gets away with stiffing them on earned stock options or promised severance pay remains to be seen.
Earlier today, it was reported that he banned a flight-tracking app that revealed the whereabouts of his private jet in something approximating real time. He called it a security issue, and whether or not that’s a valid argument, it’s at least a colorable one.
This is not.
“Several prominent journalists that cover Twitter and its new CEO Elon Musk were suspended from the social media platform on Thursday night,” The Hill reported on December 15, 2022 (story here). It’s somewhat understandable that Musk doesn’t want his platform used to facilitate the production of unflattering news reports about him, but it’s also disgustedly thin-skinned.
Sure, you don’t expect reporters to write negative stories about the owner of the newspaper they work for (although it’s been known to happen). But Twitter is more like a phone company than a newspaper. Of course, this won’t stop their coverage of Musk’s antics and peccadillos; they can and will find and use alternative messaging methods.
But it puts the lie to Musk’s assertion that he would open up Twitter to “free speech.” He’s censoring like crazy, far beyond just these journalists, and he’s not fooling anyone when Trump is welcome and journalist critics are not. Everyone sees that Twitter is becoming a vehicle for rightwing propaganda, and closed to anyone who would challenge Musk’s views.
The Twitter that longtime users knew is gone, and it’s time for non-Musk-loving tweeters to go somewhere else. One of those places is Mastadon, an up-and-coming rival to Twitter.
Musk banned Mastadon from Twitter, too. He not only doesn’t like criticism, he doesn’t like competition, either. That, as much as anything, exposes his real motivations for the world to see. And in the process, he’s making himself one heckuva an unpopular billionaire.