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Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase has thrust the social media censorship debate squarely into the limelight, triggering the left and elating the right. Celebrities and the liberal media were quick to denounce Musk’s stance on free speech (which is odd, given that those on the left were the advocates of the First Amendment just a decade ago) and some deleted their Twitter accounts. Conservatives, meanwhile, and anyone who cares about free speech, immediately raised the eccentric billionaire to superhero status. Almost overnight, he went from ‘cool rich guy who values free market capitalism’ to savior of the First Amendment. And maybe he will be. But let’s take a moment to zoom out on the bigger picture. Twitter is not Musk’s only darling, and maybe we’re placing too much of a burden on one man. Understandably, without Donald Trump in the White House, regular middle-class Americans long for a hero to disrupt the leftist elite empire. Someone influential, powerful, and brave and who will actually take substantive action is like a godsend to us. And at least on the surface, it appears Elon Musk could fill that role. He’s straight forward, seems genuine, and thus far, capable of dealing with the backlash from his enemies. However, Musk is, first and foremost, a businessman who loves building things and creating. When most of us were still playing with blocks, he was already writing code. It remains unclear how he’s going to like playing politics in the long term, and social media is inevitably political. While that’s not entirely new to the prolific tweeter, politics isn’t his usual territory. The billionaire has already walked back his “free speech absolutist” comments, explaining that what he really meant was free speech that adheres to the law. Fair enough, but the tweet came across as making him seem a bit less steady on his feet. And he will have to be plenty steady, because he’s going to need the proverbial fighting skills of Mike Tyson to handle what’s coming next under the Biden regime. After all, the Democrats have made it clear that they want to control all information to Orwellian extremes. Is Elon ready for that? And even if he is, there’s really only so much he can do with Twitter. It may be a private company, but private companies are subject to government regulations. The founder of multiple multi-billion-dollar companies, he knows this better than anyone and is no stranger to working with the US government and even seeking its help.
Despite being well known as a believer in a limited, hands-off type of government, Musk has on more than one occasion accepted subsidies from the US government for several of his companies. In addition, SpaceX currently has two contracts with the Pentagon to launch Falcon 9 rockets in the coming year. read more on our Forum

The 45th US President Donald Trump has no intention of coming back to Twitter, even after the platform’s acquisition by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk that was announced on Monday.
Trump told Fox News he will instead make his social media comeback on TRUTH Social, his own platform, in the coming days. “I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on TRUTH,” Trump told the cable network on Monday. “I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on TRUTH.” Trump’s own platform launched back in February, but he has yet to make an appearance there. He told Fox he plans to start “truthing” over the next seven days. The real-estate mogul turned Republican president famously leveraged his social media presence to bypass the legacy media in the 2016 campaign, first defeating the GOP establishment and then Democrat Hillary Clinton in the general election. He continued to use his personal Twitter account after taking office, prompting one federal judge to rule he’s not allowed to block critics. Following the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol, however, Twitter “permanently suspended” Trump, saying some people could interpret his tweets as incitement of violence. Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat quickly followed suit. Citing Twitter’s censorship of the satirical site Babylon Bee, Elon Musk made an offer to buy the platform earlier this month. Though the Twitter board initially rejected that bid and tried to insert a “poison pill” provision to head it off, on Monday they said they would accept his offer for a $44 billion takeover. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement announcing the purchase. Restoring the accounts censored on political grounds over the years – including Trump – is among the top requests Musk is currently getting on Twitter.

Over the past decade, Microsoft has pulled off a remarkable transformation of its public image in Europe — from bad boy to the most Brussels-friendly of tech giants? But that shine may now be coming off. In Brussels and across Europe, the Seattle-based giant faces a flurry of antitrust complaints about its cloud business as well as fresh claims that the company is not living up to its word on paying press publishers for their content. A new onslaught is picking away at Microsoft's image in Europe as the "friendly one" among Big Tech companies — a position that was painstakingly cultivated under the leadership of Microsoft's veteran lawyer-president, Brad Smith, during the past seven years. “Some companies have pretended for years to have cloaks of invisibility, but the spell has worn off. Abuse of market dominance is unfair and now that the abuse is slowly becoming visible, we as legislators will ensure that the cloaks no longer will work,” said Paul Tang, a left-wing Dutch member of the European Parliament. Microsoft has tactfully managed to avoid the heavy antitrust fines of yesteryear — the last significant one being a €561 million slap on the wrist in 2013 for failing to follow previous competition orders, closing a 10-year period in which it had racked up €2.24 billion in EU antitrust penalties. But practices are now emerging that hark back to the time when the company found itself in the EU's crosshairs, calling into question its straight-laced image. “Microsoft also engages in many of the same practices in the few areas where it has an entrenched position — in particular, how it uses Windows’ dominant position in PC operating systems to leverage into other markets,” said Zach Meyers, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform. He was referring to the bundling of Microsoft's products and the promotion of its own services within its own systems — concerns that prompted office messenger service Slack to file a complaint to the European Commission in 2020, over concerns that the company had been illegally tying its Teams software, which competes with Slack's own, with its "market-dominant Office productivity suite." The Commission is still evaluating the complaint. Among pro-regulation pushes, Microsoft supported the EU’s recently adopted Digital Markets Act, pitching a series of "principles" for its own app store intended to curry favor with EU regulators working on the new rules. Smith himself contracted meetings with the bloc's digital czar Margrethe Vestager, in which he highlighted his company's commitment to the EU crackdown on Big Tech giants. But those stances are now being called into question amid a flurry of complaints, targeting one of Microsoft's largest and less-known businesses: cloud computing. In Q2 this year, the company’s commercial cloud revenues reached $22.1 billion. The European Commission has started to ask cloud computing companies about Microsoft’s practices in their market following complaints filed last year by the likes of French cloud outfit OVH Cloud and German player NextCloud. The former had accused Microsoft of abusive licensing terms while the latter was concerned about the bundling of the company’s OneDrive products and services with the Windows operating system. EU antitrust regulators circulated a questionnaire to Microsoft Azure partners and rival outfits in March, soliciting information on potentially abusive actions undertaken by the U.S. tech outfit regarding the licensing of its products. For its part, CISPE, a cloud services association representing some of the players involved in the Microsoft complaints, said that smaller firms that rely on Microsoft’s cloud have been afraid to speak out. “Fear of retaliation and dependency on its productivity software created a culture of omertà that prevented people from speaking out,” said Francisco Mingorance, secretary-general of CISPE. For more visit OUR FORUM.

  

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