People are tired of being bullied

Julie Reeder

Publisher

I believe people are tired of being bullied in politics, government at all levels, school boards, and media. I think this is why parents have been rising up too. And this is why some people are becoming bullies in response. I believe this is why there’s so much interest in Elon Musk making moves to buy Twitter.

Free speech advocates are hopeful while others are afraid. Especially the managers, board members and fact checkers that may lose their jobs. The stockholders would make money, which is supposed to be the point. However they aren’t being given the chance to vote on it.

Instead, the Twitter board responded by voting to insert a “poison pill” in its bylaws which allows other shareholders, but not the would-be buyer, to buy newly minted shares at a discount, boosting their investments while forcing Musk to swallow “economic poison” by having his shares diluted.

Some people have said they aren’t comfortable with a billionaire owning it, yet they are OK with Zuckerberg owning Facebook, Bezos owning The Washington Post and Amazon and other billionaires owning media companies. It’s more about the ideology, control and profit.

As former Walt Disney chief executive Michael Eisner put it in an infamous leaked internal memo: “We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.”

Did you know that six companies control 90% of what you read, watch and hear?

Musk has been very vocal about how he feels about the censorship that has taken place at Twitter, including comedians like Dave Chapelle and accounts like the Babylon Bee. But it’s far more than comedians. It’s anyone who doesn’t parrot one ideology for whatever the topic of the day is.

Twitter and Facebook have come under fire and been called to testify in DC for their anti-free speech practices including censorship of people that don’t come in line with their company’s ideology. Including their canceling of a U.S. president, while terrorists and dictators from around the world were still welcome to tweet their heart’s desire and post on Facebook.

It has been reported that Musk is now in talks with investors to join his bid to purchase Twitter.

Musk enjoys tweeting. He says that’s how he expresses himself. He started this whole thing with a Twitter poll, asking his 79 million followers, “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?" He asked them to vote carefully because the consequences of the poll would be important.

The new Twitter CEO who is not a free speech advocate first said they would work with Musk and put him on the board. Musk didn’t want to do that. Probably because it would limit what he could do legally.

It's interesting to me because they are calling what Musk is doing a “hostile takeover” move, and not in the best interest of the stockholders, but he’s literally offering to buy everyone’s shares at a premium. The investors would all make money. More money than they could sell their shares for presently. They would literally have no interest in the company afterward to worry about.

But that’s the issue isn’t it?

Musk now has to either wage a proxy contest to remove the directors and reverse the poison pill, find an alternative buyer (a “white knight”), which would make his shares more valuable or he could walk away now and let the shareholders file lawsuits against the board for killing the value of their stock and breaching their fiduciary responsibilities to look after stockholder interests, rather than their own.

Musk says he would make the censorship algorithms that dictate those decisions open sourced so people could see why they were being censored and he would prefer to loosen it up so that if there is a gray area that speech should be protected.

That is a real problem for people who are ideologically motivated and want to control what you see, hear and watch.

While Twitter and Facebook, in unison, were censoring legitimate frontline doctors discussing alternative cures to what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration were promoting for COVID-19, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, Thursday, July 15, 2021, admitted during a White House news conference that the Biden administration was working with and identifying "problematic" posts for Facebook to censor to limit "misinformation" on the coronavirus vaccine.

What those epidemiologists and virologists and doctors who were labeled as “misinformation” spreaders and “conspiracy theorists” were saying is now largely accepted, even by the CDC.

People are hungry for free speech and media that is not controlled.

I believe this is one of the reasons for the explosion in podcasts like Joe Rogan and Tim Cast IRL. How is it that regular guys have millions more people watching them than nightly news? People are hungry for open uncensored discussion. They are tired of being bullied by the media, by the government, by school boards and corporations on all levels.

They want to actually have open discussions about politics and science, including dissenting information, and have the freedom to be in charge of their own minds, bodies, souls, and make decisions for their families and children.

Especially where there’s risk, as in COVID vaccines, there should be choice.

And Musk believes that it is foundational to our democracy and democracies around the world.

In an article on substack by Rebecca Strong, she outlines how deregulation paved the way for media conglomerates to dominate the media landscape. In 1983, 50 companies dominated the media landscape. It shrunk to just nine companies by the 1990s and today only six conglomerates control 90% of what you watch, read or listen to. They include Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Sony, Fox and Paramount Global (formerly known as ViacomCBS).

She writes, “To put this into perspective: that means about 232 media executives have the power to decide what information 277 million Americans are able to access. In 2021, the ‘big six’ banked a total of more than $478 billion in revenue. That’s more than both Finland’s and Ukraine’s GDP combined.”

She adds, “It's no secret that the goal of corporate-owned media is to increase the profits of the few, not to empower the many. As a result, people are increasingly immersed in an information system structured to reinforce their social biases and market to their buying preferences.”

President Donald Trump was kicked off Twitter as were several other high profile conservatives, and is launching his own new social media platform Truth Social. This is in addition to several other apps which are trying to even the playing field online, but no one is really able to compete presently with Twitter and Facebook and Google search, which has also been proven to have censorship issues.

Elon is smart. Whereas Twitter is busy censoring people. Elon is listening to them. Then he puts his money where his mouth is. He was publicly also saying that it might be time for an alternative social media platform.

People crave free speech, the free exchange of information and the freedom of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

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