A Twitter “town square” with no guardrails

Scott Galloway, writing at No Mercy / No Malice

He commands the price movements of crypto markets and the attention of 82.6 million Twitter followers. And now he wants to buy Twitter itself — to buy one of the world’s most influential vehicles of mass-communication, or what he calls the “de facto public town square.” It’s also clear there are no longer any guardrails.

I believe Elon will be a poster child for how power corrupts potential.

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Putting a town square under the ownership of one man has already proven catastrophic. Mark Zuckerberg owns 13% of Meta’s shares and, thanks to the company’s dual-class structure, controls 55% of the votes. As Shoshana Zuboff put it, “Zuckerberg sits at his celestial keyboard, and he can decide day by day, hour by hour, whether people are going to be more angry or less angry, whether publications are going to live or die.”

Bloomberg: “Musk has made it clear that his primary goal in buying Twitter is to support unfettered expression and reduce user bans or takedowns of individual tweets.”

Does this mean Musk would allow Trump back on Twitter? What a shit show that would be.

Twitter is too important a platform to be owned by one person with no guardrails.