The future of the free press, citizen journalism, and the public voice hangs in the balance. Elon Musk has made this clear with a bombardment of tweets.
After declaring, ‘This platform [X] is the top source of news on Earth!’ Musk said, ‘Legacy media sits upon a throne of lies!’ He further accused it of ‘relentlessly spreading hate and division’.
‘The legacy media is the propaganda arm of the radical leftists, so [it] will immediately go after anyone who merely wants centrist policies and fairness for all … the reason the public no longer trusts the legacy media is that the media has been exposed as lying too many times to count. Legacy media absolutely deserves the lack of respect and ridicule it gets.’
Musk has also made comments that this election ‘is a verdict on civilisation’ and he may be right. The way in which a government interprets freedom is the foundation of its laws. If freedom means freedom to agree with the government and everything else is dangerous misinformation and disinformation, then Western Civilisation is kindle for the communist fires.
During an interview earlier this year, Elon Musk explained exactly why he believes citizen journalism, which is being heavily promoted by X, is vastly superior to conventional journalism.
‘This is really going to be the new model of news, which is to gather information from people who are at the scene … you’ve got real-time aggregation of the collective wisdom of tens of millions of people. Although something may be said that is incorrect, it is very quickly corrected. Whereas a newspaper that is publishing, what happened yesterday, when you read the article, that article could be wrong, often is wrong, but there’s no rebuttal to the article.’
What Elon Musk says is true, there is a war against free speech. Unpopular governments are obsessed with controlling the press because they perceive criticism as a threat. If government is wrong about something, their God-like status is diminished. The closer a government is to a dictatorship, the more it fears the whispering of its people amplified in print. While Xi Jinping spent Halloween rounding up people dressed as Donald Trump, imagine how terrified our governments are of the day climate change is proven false. The public will want more than a pound of flesh to account for trillions of dollars in missing public money.
It is also true that protecting speech is a business concern for Elon Musk. He has decided to monetise freedom and his business model cannot survive in a world of tyrants and mentally fragile socialist parties.
There are worse things for rich people to do than make a business out of liberating human speech.
Saying that Elon Musk’s business goals align with the fundamental rights of the West is not to pick fault. If capitalism can save democracy, what better proof will we have that free markets are superior to interfering governments who, when appointing themselves to the task of ‘citizen safety’ choose ‘citizen slavery’ as their solution?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/11/garbage-the-free-press-and-the-war-over-apo...https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/radionational-drive/legal-experts-shoot-d...
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