Elon Musk’s month or so in charge of Twitter has been rather eventful. From banning parody accounts to reinstating former President Donald Trump, there has rarely been a day in which the new CEO and his new platform have not made the news. While some worry that Musk will turn Twitter into a free speech hellscape, others have lauded the Tesla founder for attempting to reduce the platform’s systemic Left-leaning bias. But the question remains: should we be troubled or encouraged by the concentration of all this power in one man’s hands?
Vivek Ramaswamy, political commentator and author of Woke Inc., sat down with Freddie Sayers to explain why he doesn’t see Musk as a saviour. According to Ramaswamy, the problem of censorship on social media platforms is a tangled web, the threads of which lead us back to the Wall Street Crash in 2008. Back then, capitalists were seen as the “bad guys by the old Left” until they realised that being a bad guy was bad for business:
When Silicon Valley caught on, this ‘mutual prostitution’, as Ramaswamy calls it, created a loophole for the US Government where the First Amendment needn’t apply:
Censorship as a company policy soon mutated into an opportunity for poorly disguised state censorship, most notably in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Ramaswamy uses lockdown sceptic and former New York Times journalist, Alex Berenson as an example:
Elon Musk’s ongoing release of the ‘Twitter Files’ arguably demonstrates more than a fair-weather commitment to, if not ending, then certainly denouncing censorship as well as government collusion with Big Tech. Be that as it may, in Ramaswamy’s opinion, the need for deeper institutional change remains. In his view, Musk will still have to play by the rules if he wants Twitter to survive. And there is one ‘master’ he will always have to appease:
Thanks to Vivek Ramaswamy for joining us at UnHerd TV.
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