Elon Musk, Twitter & The Indypendent
Last week, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, purchased Twitter, the world’s “town square”, for $44 billion. Twitter’s total number of users (235 million) is dwarfed by Facebook (1.98 billion) and the company loses money almost every year. Yet, it has an outsized influence on the media and public discourse.
The media has been rife with speculation about what Musk will do next. He is expected to fire half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees. The company’s top executives have already been dismissed and additional layoffs began today. It is also widely expected that content moderation will be loosened and bigoted, far-right wing trolls (including Trump who was banished after January 6) allowed to run wild. Will Progressive Twitter, in its many iterations, carry out a Twexit? Will corporate advertisers flee with them? Will Twitter implode and Musk, whose business empire includes Tesla Motors and Space-X, tumble from the sky like a modern-day Icarus?
Or does it matter to Musk whether Twitter makes money at all? As CNBC writes, “As the owner of Twitter, Musk now controls a platform that has mounds of data about the connections among its users, their interactions, their interests and so on. Just imagine the information available about Tesla’s automotive competitors — how much they’re spending on advertising, which keywords and demographics they’re targeting, how they engage with customers and fans, how they receive and resolve customer service complaints and more.
Left unsaid is, why should one man have so much power?
The hell with corporate dystopia. I support The Indypendent!
In this 2014 article, we asked why we can’t have a civic-minded Internet free from the relentless logic of capitalist profit-seeking? That is still the question. In the meantime, we should defend and support the public commons that we still do have, including The Indypendent.
No one puts it more eloquently than our Associate Editor Amba Guerguerian. In a first-person testimonial she recently wrote for our 22nd anniversary issue, Guerguerian describes how she found a home at The Indy where she could hone her craft as a young reporter and pour her passion for social justice into her work as she covered stories that would not be told anywhere else. She also describes the essential but unglamorous grunt work that keeps this community institution functioning and then closes with this appeal.
“In this huge city, it’s easy for us as individuals or groups to feel isolated. The Indy helps us see our connectedness, see ourselves as something more than the sum of our parts, as a movement of movements,” Guerguerian writes.
When We Support The Indypendent, We Strengthen the Public Commons
By Amba Guerguerian
If you believe in what we do, if you want more of it and if you can see yourself as a part of our extended community, please make a donation. And if you can afford to, even if it’s a small amount, please make that donation recurring.
Indy News Hour Election Night Special Edition!
WBAI-99.5 FM is another rare source of truly independent media in New York City with its signal beaming 90 miles in all directions from atop a skyscraper in Mid-Manhattan. We’re proud that The Indypendent News Hour has become one of the station’s premiere news shows. On Tuesday, we will expand our regular one-hour news show to a five-hour election-night special that will air from 5–10 p.m. followed by Democracy Now!’s special from 10 p.m.–midnight. During our election-night coverage, we will speak with analysts and organizers on the ground in New York and in key battleground states — where the fate of the House and the Senate will be decided. Special guests will include Linda Sarsour, Tom Robbins, Linda Martín Alcoff, Mondale Robinson, Brynn Tannehill, Liza Featherstone, State Senator Jabari Brisport and Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest.
We will be shouting out listeners throughout the broadcast. Send us a short message at contact@indypendent.org. Tell us something about yourself and why you listen to the show and we will include you too!