Elon Musk Twitter offer would allow him to privatize the company. And one person controlling Twitter would be “incompatible with democracy,” according to a researcher, Shoshana Zuboff. Unrestricted data gathering about user actions allows the social media industry to have enormous influence over real-world events. “This is a disaster, and it’s not only about Elon Musk, but he kind of puts it on steroids” she said.
Elon Musk’s intention to turn Twitter into a private business has raised concerns among privacy experts and social media researchers, including one former Harvard professor who told The Washington Post that having just one person in charge of the social network “is a catastrophe” for user privacy.
What was Elon Musk Twitter offer?
Elon Musk, who has 81 million Twitter followers, is a frequent user of the service but also one of its most vocal critics. In March, Musk tweeted a poll to his followers on Twitter asking if they thought the platform was protecting free speech. He told that the poll results, in which 70% of 2 million respondents answered “no,” would be “very significant.”
Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor and author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” has stated that huge ad revenues and unbridled data gathering have revolutionized the social media industry, which now exerts significant influence over real-world events.
Related: Twitter would commit suicide rather than getting privatized
She stressed that social media content could potentially impact public opinion and cause a behavioral change, therefore, the people in control of the platforms have considerable influence.
“There should be a lot of checks and balances in place before we give one person that much power,” she added. “It’s incompatible with democracy to allow someone to have that much power.” “There are simply no checks and balances from any internal or external force,” Zuboff told. Should Musk take ownership of Twitter, the Tesla CEO would have near-complete control over an amount of user data “that cannot be compared to anything that has ever existed, and allows intervention into the integrity of individual behavior and also the integrity of collective behavior,” she proclaims and adds “This is a disaster, and it’s not only about Elon Musk, but he kind of puts it on steroids.”
