With SpaceX CEO Elon Musk buying Twitter for a staggering $44 billion, the Democrats and news outlets like CNN are having meltdowns about what this means for the ongoing threat of disinformation. When platforms like Twitter and Facebook banned former President Donald Trump, the left didn’t appear fazed by the move. More importantly, some celebrated it. But now that Musk is advocating for free speech and said, “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law”, a CNN analyst was overcome with hysteria as he suggested the sale was sending the country straight to hell.
In the video, which is featured below, analyst David Zurawik was adamant that not only was Musk buying Twitter dangerous, but the United States should look to Europe for guidance. He said, “There’s a bigger problem here about how we are going to control the channels of communication in this country. In 1927, we had the Radio Act. 1934, the Communications Act. Congress stepped in, we made rules. FCC wasn’t great, but it’s still regulating the broadcast industry. You can’t use vulgar language. You can’t do all these things with speech. We gave what amounts to our airwaves or our internet waves to Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and we are in so much trouble because those guys believe in making money.”
Zurawik added, “We’ve already seen that with the 2016 election and Zuckerberg when he was taking rubles for ads from Russia and saying, ‘Oh, I think it’s crazy to think they had any influence on this election. Musk is the same. You know he’s upset with the SEC, how dare they question them. This is dangerous.”
It should be noted that while Zurawik criticized Zuckerberg, the same Facebook CEO poured $400 million into the 2020 election that went to predominantly Democratic strongholds. At that time, there were no calls for investigations from the left.
Still, Zurawik concluded, “We can’t think anymore in this country. I’m serious, we don’t have people in Congress who can make regulations that can make it work. I think we can look to the western countries in Europe for how they are trying to limit it, but you need controls on this, you need regulation, you cannot let these guys control discourse in this country or we are headed to hell.”
As the focus remains on Twitter, it’s interesting how the platform would come under scrutiny when during the 2020 election, the app suppressed information surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop as being Russian disinformation. Again, there were no calls for concern from the left until Musk took over.
Users online shared their opinion, writing, “He said it multiple times. What they fear is not having “control”. PANIC”, and “Says nothing about Bezos knocking dissenting voices off Amazon, and owns Washington Post.”