There's more to online hate than ElonMusk and why the digital public square needs public antitrust solutions.
The weekend after Thanksgiving, when Twitter’s automated defenses failed and allowed footage of the Christchurch massacre to recirculate, I was transported back to 2019.
One thing I’ve learned from my years fighting online hate is that while Musk is deeply problematic, he is not the problem. Twitter is not the problem. Social media is not the problem. The problem is that megalomaniacal billionaires can take over our public squares, our support systems and our livelihoods on a whim and warp them to feed their endless hunger for power and adoration. Meanwhile, we exhaust ourselves trying to get them to value our lives more than their profits.
We all deserve more than to be the casualties of an egotistical, cringe-inducing billionaire’s mid-life crisis. We deserve more than an uneven playing field that consistently profits off of hate, yet purports to be a public square. We deserve to have the power to protect ourselves and the only way to do that is to take it from billionaires like Musk.
We’ve tried engaging with these social media billionaires and that has failed. To keep them in check, we need new solutions like antitrust law, which exists so that no one entity can exert unfettered control over entire aspects of our lives. Right now, we have a where lawmakers in both political parties at least claim to be open to antitrust solutions. We must seize it to finally empower and protect communities that have been victimized for far too long.
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