November 3, 2022: Welcoming its purchase by Elon Musk
Elon Musk says he has invested $ 44 Billion of his own money to make Twitter more open and available for all the different points-of-view in every democracy.
By April 25, 2022, Musk had acquired a large number of shares of Twitter and had got a seat on the Board of Twitter. On that day, in a statement, he had said,” “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square, where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s ex-CEO, had added, “Twitter has a purpose and relevance that impacts the entire world.”
We welcome this transfer of control of an increasingly ‘woke’ Twitter from Jack Patrick Dorsey to Elon Musk, with the hope that it would always help empower individual freedom and blunt the rise of dictatorial regimes.
Over the last couple of years, in USA, Twitter, under Dorsey and Parag, was being made available to ‘Wokes’ and others were being shut out. The situation was worse in the democracy of India, where the platform of Twitter was working, jointly with Al Jazeera and the Sino-Pak axis to bring down the reputation of India. It seemed to be working in support of those, who were working to remove Narendrabhai Modi’s government.
Democracies are facing challenges from a strong axis of dictatorial and Islamist powers, led by China, with support of Pakistan, its junior ally. The Islamist part is supported by the world-wide network of Muslim Brotherhood and Al Jazeera, both sustained by Qatar’s munificence. After becoming the most important digital town square for political discourse, the Twitter started undermining democratic leaders, by painting them as fascists while simultaneously building up the anarchic Woke leaders as true democrats. This has helped make the NGOs for indexing democracies and Human rights organizations ineffective. These were designed to encourage the growth and strengthening of democracies. Today China and Iran are influential members of UN Human Rights Council. On the other hand, the most vociferous and argumentative India is indexed as a poorer democracy as compared with some semi-dictatorial regimes.
If Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter were to make it a true, non-partisan Digital Time Square for democracies, it should become a powerful tool for democracies in their fight against dictatorial regimes.
We find that @NYT, in (tinyurl.com/33xnm342), published on October 27, 2022, is not positive about the transfer of control of Twitter from Dorsey to Musk. @NYT is entitled to have a different view-point. But to call Musk as a rogue or robber baron (in the very beginning of the article,) without any supporting facts, arguments or discussion is unfair. To allege that Musk’s fortune is built on government subsidies and contracts and to disregard his intelligence and his entrepreneurial spirits completely shows that the writer is not unbiased.
If Elon Musk has invested $ 44 Billion of his own money to make Twitter more open for strengthening the democratic movement, we welcome this transfer of control to him. Twitter has made no profit in 8 out of the last 10 years. If Elon Musk is prepared to run a loss-making enterprise for serving the public purpose of expansion of space for democracies and for empowering human beings against powerful and dictatorial countries, we welcome Musk’s control of this highly powerful medium for democratic discourse. To deliver control of Twitter to an individual is fraught with dangers in the long term. But if the individual is as public spirited as Elon Musk seems to be and when the transfer has already been completed, we can do no better than hoping that Elon Musk will always consider public purpose of keeping Twitter an open platform, in the service of democratic movement, as his highest priority. We also think that if the former President Trump were to re-join Twitter, it may also be taken as a sign of a more open platform.
Note: The editor and the writer of the article in DiGiNews360 knows about Musk only through public media and has never met him or inter-acted with him, though the writer of this article has liked and forwarded a few tweets by Elon Musk during the last one year.