Take, for example, when Israel briefly cut off Gaza’s internet as part of their war strategy to eliminate Hamas. Musk announced he was going to provide it himself through his company, Starlink. After widespread criticism, he posted an exploding head emoji on Twitter. Then, when a commenter suggested he must have felt pressure to provide the coverage, Elon simply responded, “yeah,” with a frowny face. Musk apparently then met with the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, and announced that he would “double check with Israeli and U.S. security officials before enabling any connections.” The point, as my friend and writer Jacob Siegel put it, is that “non-state kingmakers are redefining the scope of warfare through direct intervention.”
Musk’s Twitter, now X, has also had a profound impact on our understanding of this war and its beginnings. It’s hard to imagine, under Twitter’s previous regime, that we would have had access to the raw footage from Hamas’s October 7 massacre.
[Eh, this is the wrong question. The correct question is whether Big Tech titans as a group have too much power, especially over speech — and if so, how they got it in the first place. Musk is actually less of an issue than Jeff Bezos, who owns both Amazon, the Washington Post, and other companies that do business with the federal government. Musk is less monopolistic in the speech-platform sector than Mark Zuckerberg, whose Meta not only owns Facebook but also Instagram and WhatsApp, among other assets. And Google is in a class by itself, thanks to its e-mail system and search-function dominance, as well as its competitive position in cell phones. — Ed]
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