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Musk's Money Is Playing Old Games With New Media Ari Paul ([link removed])


Fake tweets on Twitter

Elon Musk's $8/month "verification" scheme predictably resulted in a flood of fake tweets.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been difficult to satirize. The company is losing revenue (Reuters, 11/7/22 ([link removed]) ), thanks in large part to the $1 billion in additional debt payments Musk has saddled it with. His idea to sell blue-check verifications for $8 was widely ridiculed (Variety, 11/2/22 ([link removed]) )—predictably resulting in a flood of fake posts from "verified" accounts—and mass layoffs have put the website’s infrastructure in jeopardy (MIT Technology Review, 11/8/22 ([link removed]) ). A lockdown of the company offices had many wondering if Twitter would survive the pre-Thanksgiving weekend (Daily Beast, 11/17/22
([link removed]) ).

For the right-wing press, Musk—who backed the Republicans in the recent midterm elections (Reuters, 11/7/22 ([link removed]) )—is a social media savior who is appalled by content moderation, factchecking and the banning of certain extremist content. Fox News (11/16/22 ([link removed]) ) lauded him for reducing spending at Twitter, and others say he’s a free-speech champion trying to end Big Tech censorship (Deseret News, 11/1/22 ([link removed]) ). The New York Post (11/11/22 ([link removed]) ) said that the advertiser boycotts of Musk’s Twitter were signs of a liberal conspiracy to enforce wokeness online, while Matt Taibbi (Substack, 11/15/22
([link removed]) )—who once wrote about the greed of big banks for Rolling Stone—attacked critics of the anti-union billionaire media baron for conducting a pro-conformity witch hunt.

For all of Twitter’s problems—mean-spirited fights, harassment, bots, extremist content—the social media network has been a liberating way for writers, activists and academics to build platforms and followings free from corporate media filters. Under Musk, Twitter could become such a cesspool of hate speech (Scientific American/Nature, 11/8/22 ([link removed]) ) and impersonators (CNN, 11/9/22 ([link removed]) ) that it becomes unusable, or the stress caused by layoffs and the revenue losses could bring down the whole thing.


** Monied parties
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This would be a loss for a lot of users, but such a situation is hardly new in US media. There’s a long history of monied parties taking over media and watering them down, even breaking them up for parts. It’s just that this time it involves the world’s richest man and social media.

Look at American radio. “Since passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, Clear Channel”—now called iHeartRadio—“has grown from 40 stations to 1,240 stations,” which is “30 times more than congressional regulation previously allowed” (Future of Music Coalition, 11/18/02 ([link removed]) ). The company famously silenced the trio the Dixie Chicks on its stations in retaliation for the group’s antiwar stance (Jacksonville Business Journal, 3/18/03 ([link removed]) ; Cracked, 1/14/22 ([link removed]) ), and its news and talk stations are home to right-wing commentators—including, formerly, the late Rush Limbaugh (AP, 3/27/12 ([link removed]) ). These owners’ biases have had enormous political implications due t
o the consolidation of the radio market.
American Prospect: Why Hedge Funds Shouldn’t Own the News

American Prospect (10/1/20 ([link removed]) ): "Hedge funds control one-third of US newspapers, and all four of the largest local newspaper chains are owned or managed by these poorly regulated financial institutions."

Meanwhile, Sinclair Broadcast Group ([link removed]) , which operates nearly 200 local television stations, was staunchly supportive of the Trump administration (CounterSpin, 8/11/17 ([link removed]) ; Vox, 4/3/18 ([link removed]) ), and the group has given generously to Republicans (Center for Public Integrity, 4/3/18 ([link removed]) ). The group has the largest local television reach in the country, and its influence is only growing (New Yorker, 10/22/18 ([link removed]) ).

It’s an old story in newspaperland as well. Columbia Journalism Review (7/15/13 ([link removed]) ) reported on how Wall Street investors took over Tribune Company, “liquidating the newspapers” and “taking declining businesses and effectively selling off their remaining assets that are stable or growing.” It's a story later retold by Vanity Fair (2/5/20 ([link removed]) ) and Atlantic (10/14/21 ([link removed]) ) as the situation with Tribune papers worsened.

McClatchy was similarly purchased by Chatham Asset Management (New York Times, 8/4/20 ([link removed]) ). As the American Prospect (10/1/20 ([link removed]) ) noted, these deals often force papers to shed staff and even close down papers, due to the “practice of cutting costs to the bone to maximize short-term returns.” For example, McClatchy recently outsourced its design and typesetting work (Poynter, 3/29/21 ([link removed]) ).

In both of these cases, consolidation of local media ownership hasn’t just skewed content to the right, but it has created local news deserts where, if papers and stations exist locally, local coverage is either scraped together with barebones staff or audiences and readers are left to dine on warmed over wire copy. This is a deficit for democracy.


** Advancing mogul politics
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CJR: The Washington Post Has a Bezos Problem

Dan Froomkin (CJR, 9/27/22 ([link removed]) ): "Pretty much every public-policy issue the Post covers affects Bezos’s sprawling personal and business interests in material ways."

And consider for a minute that Musk, the CEO of Tesla, is the world’s richest person, while No. 2 is Jeff Bezos ([link removed]) of Amazon, who also owns the Washington Post. Like Musk, Bezos is another rich, corporate boss who wants to influence the public discussion through control of a major media outlet. It’s unclear how much editorial sway he has, but FAIR (10/3/17 ([link removed]) ) has pointed out the Post's factchecker (10/2/17 ([link removed]) ) defending Bezos against Sen. Bernie Sanders' accusation that Bezos has a lot of money. The Columbia Journalism Review (9/27/22 ([link removed]) ) speculates that Bezos has at least passively
influenced the direction of the Post's news and opinion sections. Musk and Bezos are two sides of the same coin here.

Or consider when the late Republican mega-donor and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal for $140 million, prompting columnist Jon Ralston (New York Times, 1/2/16 ([link removed]) ) to say, “I find it hard to believe that he would have so dramatically overpaid for that paper without having some agenda in mind.” Under Adelson, the paper (11/7/16 ([link removed]) , 10/3/20 ([link removed]) ) endorsed Donald Trump for president twice. Adelson, who was an ardent conservative Zionist, also set up a free Israeli newspaper, Israel Hayom, that until recently “served as an unofficial mouthpiece” for Benjamin Netanyahu (AP, 1/12/21
([link removed]) ).

Moguls use their money to advance their politics, both through campaign contributions and through media acquisitions. In addition to Musk’s recent endorsement of Republican candidates, his interest in conservatism grew after the presidential election of Donald Trump. “Starting in 2017, Musk's donations began to skew much more heavily toward Republicans than Democrats, spending nearly seven times more ([link removed]) on GOP campaigns,” Business Insider (6/15/22 ([link removed]) ) reported, adding that Musk “accepted positions on two of Trump's White House councils.” He cheered on a coup in Bolivia (Jalopnik, 10/19/20 ([link removed]) ) and is outspokenly hostile to unions (NPR, 3/3/22
([link removed]) ).

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter seems like a new chapter in history, but his choice to either skew Twitter to be friendly to the right (as his right-wing cheerleaders believe he is doing) or to run the network into the ground is only the latest episode of monied interests pillaging our communications infrastructure for financial or ideological gain. Musk’s Twitter takeover seems new, because it impacts new media rather than the old. But what Musk is doing to social media has long been done by monied interests to traditional media—much to the poverty of our journalistic culture.
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Featured image: New York Times depiction (11/17/22 ([link removed]) ) of Elon Musk (photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images).
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