Dangerous nonsense. This is how former Labor secretary under former US President Bill Clinton, Robert Reich describes the possible purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk.
The world’s richest man, who owns a 9 percent stake in the platform, claims he wants to unlock Twitter’s potential for free speech.
Reich says this is not a move that will help free speech flourish. He believes Twitter will be even less accountable if Musk owns it.
Robert Reich Photo: AFP / FILE
Musk has already blocked Reich on Twitter and called him a moron.
The takeover bid is not about freedom, it’s about power, says Reich.
“When you have 80 million Twitter followers and you’re also the richest man in the world, you’re not like most other normal people who use Twitter … you are somebody who really does need to be reckoned with and people need to stand up to that kind of wealth and power, but particularly abuses of wealth and power.
“There’s not enough of us, not enough people, not enough institutions willing to stand up to that, and wealth and power are more centralised now, particularly in the United States, than they’ve been in over 100 years.
“I would be sceptical when a multi-billionaire talks about freedom. What they normally talk about is their own freedom.”
Reich fears for the future if tools like Twitter are dominated by the richest and most powerful people in the world.
“Yes, we do [already have that now]. The question is what we do about it. Do we simply move to a world that is even more controlled by the billionaires, plutocrats, the oligarchs? Or do we try to move to a world where again there is more accountability and responsibility?”
Accountability has become more important with the increasing weaponisation of misinformation on social media, he says.
“Putin is using them, Xi Jinping is using them that way, but you find in even so-called free nations, democracies that social media are filled with trash, with lies, with crazy paranoid people.
“So, there’s got to be some moderation, there’s got to be some responsibility, that’s my problem. I don’t see Elon Musk taking that kind of responsibility.”
He says he doubted Musk would have gone for the board role with Twitter, because it would’ve required him to have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.
Reich wants to see responsibility for decisions about who is on social media platforms and why, “particularly with regard to very inflammatory people who have the power to guide or misguide or abuse a democracy”.
The anonymous incendiary quality of social media is also very dangerous, he says.
“I would establish safe forums. By safe I mean places where people know they’re not going to be attacked, that they feel they’re not going to be physically outed in a very negative way.
“That used to be part of our culture … that is people of goodwill and who are thoughtful and articulate disagreed with each other, but the disagreements were not dangerous.
“The disagreements were ways in which people could discern the truth or discover the truth. We’ve got a long way from that and I think these types of forums need to be established.”
But these raging culture wars, which are being fuelled on social media, have been used to deflect attention from the extraordinary concentration of wealth and power at the top, Reich says.
“This kind of frustration, mostly with economic roots, has led to a kind of demagogic cultural war that is going on in the United States and elsewhere.
“I think the oligarchs have a big role to play, I think they have an interest in dividing us so that we don’t look up and see where all the wealth and power is gone.
“It is easy to divide people, it’s easy in this kind of environment where people feel that they’re not getting ahead, they’re working harder than ever, to fuel the kind of paranoia and that’s behind much of what we see, at least in the United States.”
Wage stagnation is partially at the source of this mounting disempowerment, he says.
“By the time we got 2016 … already candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were emerging to take on the establishment.
“Trump and Sanders became powerful forces because they took on the most powerful forces or appeared to take on the most powerful in America.
“The important question is this populism progressive and pro-democracy or is this populism going to be regressive and authoritarian? That’s the fundamental issue we face.”
The wave of anger and frustration among citizens combined with Donald Trump’s refusal to concede his election loss has created the perfect storm, he says.
“This is the gravest threat we’ve had in this country since the Civil War of 1861.
“The fact that Trump refuses to concede his loss in 2020 … and spreading the kind of compulsiveness the lie that he won, and the election was stolen from him, and organising the Republican Party at the state level to change voting laws, and put his own people into positions of power in terms of deciding who is going to be the next president - all of this is cause for great alarm.
“With these undercurrents of anger and frustration that so many people feel … you put these currents together and you have a really profound danger to the largest democracy in the world.”
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at the University of California Berkeley. In 2008, Time magazine named him one of the 10 best Cabinet members of the century and he is described as one of the most influential progressive economics writers and commentators today.
