It’s bad for multinational conglomerate owners to run Twitter for obvious reasons. Will the Chinese government force Musk to turn over DMs of dissidents as a condition of approving Shanghai Gigafactory Phase II? Will President DeSantis coerce him to censor “left wing misinformation” in exchange for an extension of EV tax credits or a SpaceX contract? Unlike Bezos and WaPo, Elon has already said he’s purchasing Twitter for the express purpose of exerting editorial control.
This is a very important and under-appreciated risk. It makes Musk perhaps a uniquely unsuitable owner Twitter, when measured specifically along the "free speech" and related concerns he expresses. A more free Twitter would be owned by a person or group with very few other interests that could be used as leverage.
A possibility doesn't mean it's going to happen - and baseless fear mongering at this point. And I don't have the feeling he'd do such a thing - he's very empathetic and would understand the harm/violence that would allow.
Likewise what's to say China doesn't already have agents at Twitter and access to that data? It's far easier, and better, to do that in an incognito way - no?
Another example is Reddit's last round had Tencent contributing 50% of the round or $150 million; how much influence or access do they have because of that?
I was afraid of that, too. All I've seen so far are disclaimers about Bezo's ownership of the WP. Plenty of negative articles about Amazon is published by WP.
Ya and also it’s clear Elon cares a lot more about Twitter than Bezos does about WaPo. He’s paying 100x more and publicly obsesses about content moderation policies daily. If some government regulating Amazon tried seriously to coerce Bezos into doing something at WaPo, he probably just would have sold it to someone else
Honestly, I'm surprised when it comes to Bezos and the WP. Bezos, for all he achieved, is class-A hole when it come to labor rights an how employees are treated. Heck, the guy bought a second yacht to land his chopper on because his primary yacht, being a sail ship and all, doesn't have place for a heli pad. He's prime capitalism excess. And there he is, having bought WP to prevent it from falling into hard times and, as of now, he did not interfere with WPs reporting.
Disclaimer: I'm an ex-Amazonian, and I think it is great company to work at (blue collar jobs excluded, but that's true for all warehouse and delivery jobs). Amazon managed to get rid of the middle population of a Gauss distribution regarding performance, Amazon is relentless (I like that drive for efficiency). By taking out the middle, so, the very top and the very bottom are left unchecked and un-moderated. Which breeds all kinds of problems.
"he did not interfere with WPs reporting."--this just means, Bezos doesn't directly deal with the editorial staff and reporters. In other words, you don't see legally admissible evidence for his interference. Next time, work with c-level execs, and see how they create the impression of 'non-interference' and yet interfere.
I read, occasionally, the WP, the NYT, Le Monde and Spiegel (don't ask about the latter, it is the major "free" online paper in Germany). So far I have yet to see a difference between those when it comes to Bezos or Amazon (excluding differences between European and US reporting), nor do I see any major bias differences between NYT and WP.
And that's all the interference I care about when it comes to reporting.
