I tried to read this to see the "establishment" view and honestly it's worse than I would have even though. Can you imagine saying "Musk joins the list of rich, white men who single-handedly control social platforms that collectively reach and shape the lives of billions of people..." in an adult conversation. The whole objection to Musk buying twitter is he's introducing an alternative to the mainstream SV tech viewpoint, yet somehow this gets spun as the exact opposite (with some casual racism thrown in).
I think there is lots of room for analysis about why the acquisition could be bad. I don't see any of that here, just some lazy strawman arguments and tired talking points. Even for CNN I expected better
Twitter isn't even in the top 10 largest social media sites.
I assert that its importance is vastly overblown because journalists were early adopters and they love talking "inside baseball" leading to a feedback loop of promotion where its perceived importance vastly exceeds its actual.
With no exception, any and all important twitter events could have and would have been experienced with equal impact if they had occurred on other sites.
As far as political impact goes, because its userbase is microscopically minuscule compared to other forms of media, most if not nearly all "consumers" of Twitter content actually get it elsewhere.
Its absence would have all of the impression farms that call themselves news sites simply adopt an alternative source for their outrage-inducing content.
It's importance is overblown only because Donald Trump made it the de facto nexus for White House communication, because he considered the press his enemy, and because the far-right fringe of his followers turned their bans into a moral crusade against a fictional conspiracy of political oppression being waged against them by the platform and its ostensible Deep State cancel culture agenda, which was then normalized within his party, to the point of driving debate and potential legislation.
Before Trump, Twitter didn't matter much, even though plenty of journalists and other notable people were on it, including former Presidents.
Worth noting that Seth Fiegerman, the author of this piece, has been a Twitter user since 2009. For people like me, who have been a Twitter user since never, it's hard to get past the fact that I really don't care what happens to the platform any more than I worry about the demise of Facebook or Linkedin.
In fairness, you'd expect them to ask someone who had lots of twitter experience and does care what happens to write the article. That said, it wasn't very good, and I think that most people don't care what happens. The difference here is there is some left vs right political drama coming out of it so people follow the story for that, to either get to feign outrage or mock the other sides feigned outrage in turn.
> Musk, prone to self-aggrandizement, insists his interest is to aid humanity, but he also insists that he knows best how to do so at each turn and does not seem to take criticism very well. He and his supporters have been known to lash out at detractors on Twitter, where he spends an unusual amount of time for someone running multiple companies.
I think there is lots of room for analysis about why the acquisition could be bad. I don't see any of that here, just some lazy strawman arguments and tired talking points. Even for CNN I expected better