Collins’ fear is quite representative of what many media figures think about this prospective takeover of Twitter. Axios described Musk’s behavior as akin to a supervillain, while Jeff Jarvis, a City University of New York journalism professor, lamented that he was witnessing the rise of Nazi Germany.
What scares them so much about Musk is simply that he has criticized Twitter’s past efforts to moderate content, which in his view too frequently resulted in the muzzling of legitimate political speech. The most infamous example, of course, was Twitter’s treatment of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story, which even Twitter’s former CEO, Jack Dorsey, has admitted was a mistake.
But mainstream media figures tend to think social media needs more guardrails, not fewer. They have broadly adopted the framing that Twitter and Facebook are rife with misinformation, that it is the media’s job to identify the misinformation, and that it is the platforms’ job to eliminate it.
Such sweeping condemnations from the mainstream media often elide the fact that information is wrongly labeled misinformation with some frequency and that misinformation czars (both self-appointed and government-appointed) tend to get things wrong.
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