Is society better off as a result of Twitter?
Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley says Liberals want 'total domination' and that explains their response to Musk's Twitter takeover on 'Sunday Night in America.'
Fox News host Trey Gowdy and Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley discussed Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s recent purchase of Twitter for approximately $44 billion on "Sunday Night in America."
Gowdy questioned whether Twitter has made society better off and whether Musk’s purchase could make things better or worse for social media.
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Still of Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jason Riley (Fox News)
"I think it is too early to determine that," Riley said. "We will see. I do think we are probably better off with Elon Musk buying Twitter if only to provide some balance here. I think it’s interesting to listen to how crazy the left has gone."
Riley also noted that Democrats and left-wing media have attacked this move despite still influencing other major social media and Big Tech platforms.
"Similarly, you have here with Big Tech and social media, even with Elon Musk buying Twitter, you’re still going to have Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook who spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to turn out Democrats to vote in 2020. You’re still going to have Jeff Bezos running Amazon where they censor conservative books and streaming of conservative movies and so forth," Riley said. "But they’re not satisfied with that. They’re not satisfied unless they have total domination of every single thing. And you have to wonder, it’s not only disturbing, it’s very telling, I think."
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Oct. 18, 2013: Twitter app displayed on an iPhone screen in New York. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
Addressing media concerns that Musk’s purchase would lead to more "disinformation," Riley remarked that Musk would be motivated by the free market to limit fake news himself.
"Well, he wants to take it private therefore it would be. And I think again that would be a good thing. He wants this to be a going business concern. He wants to make money. He wants to keep advertisers happy and so forth. And to the extent this platform is putting out disinformation, that is bad for business, so it’s an incentive when he takes this private to do just that," Riley said. "And frankly, Trey, I will take this over some big tech industrial policy [and] Congress getting involved. We sort of have the Biden administration going down this with a truth minister out there. I guess no one has read George Orwell in the Biden administration."
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Employees at tables inside Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Thursday, March 17, 2022. (Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Riley concluded, "In any case I think that this is the free market private sector handling this the best way it can be handled. Will it be perfect? No, but like Churchill said about democracy, the worst thing we’ve got except for all of the other alternatives. I think this is playing out the way it should be. If Elon Musk blows it, he’ll be blowing a lot of money and someone else will pick up the ball and try to put it together again. But this is the way it should happen."