Stories and News No. 1268
Those who follow Stories and News perhaps know that for various reasons explained in detail here, almost exactly three years ago I closed my accounts and related pages on social networks, including Facebook, Twitter and even Instagram, even though I had signed up to the latter only recently.
Therefore, the premise is a must: I am biased. That is, it is obvious how I think about the subject.
However I still feel the need and also the desire to write something about what happened recently in the wonderful kingdom of 140 280 characters, the cool people’s land, not those Boomers on FB and Generations Z or Alpha of the many well-filtered images and influential mini videos’ networks.
The social place preferred by activists of the catchphrase and hopefully viral memes, as well as by pseudo-intellectuals who always have something to say about everything rose to global prominence for its acquisition by the ambiguous billionaire Elon Musk.
The reactions were many and varied, seasoned with alarmism, panic and anguish among users in the face of the alleged loss of freedom of expression and purity of ideals in the digital island where many of the inhabitants reassured themselves by saying: here we have not those sneaks of Mark Zuckerberg and his buddies or that tyrant of Bill Gates, we have Jack Dorsey, he's a philanthropist, he goes to work on foot and he even went to meditate with the master Vipaśyanā.
Okay, let's pause the movie for a moment, or rather the most fashionable TV series, and let’s go back a couple of episodes, for example just before the news of Musk's interest in Twitter was spread.
Before resuming the vision and returning to the hypnotizing, alienating rather than socializing carriage, I invite you to reflect on some points, far from obvious.
First, unfortunately, billionaires have always owned media, social or otherwise.
Referring only to the United States, in the mid-20th century, news outlets deemed icons of the free press were generally owned by a few wealthy families: the Grahams owned the Washington Post, the Chandlers owned the Los Angeles Times, the Taylors owned the Washington Post. The Boston Globe and, of course, the Sulzbergers owned (and still own) the New York Times. Likewise, the major media companies that controlled TV stations were owned by some prominent and wealthy people, such as the Cox family (who still control an abundance of cable and TV stations), the Gannet family, and, some 'later, the Sinclair family and their hundreds of stations and, of course, the Murdochs with the Fox Network and the Wall Street Journal (bought by another wealthy family, the Bancrofts). And today things have not changed at all, far from it.
Second, if you thought that your friend Dorsey was a guarantee for the pure soul of the land of tweets, here is a list with some of its largest shareholders, updated yesterday: The Vanguard Group, Inc. with more than 3 billion dollars., Morgan Stanley Investment Management with $ 2 billion, BlackRock Fund Advisors and SSgA Funds Management, Inc. with approximately 1.5 billion, and Aristotle Capital Management LLC with nearly $ 800 million.
Where do you think these money comes from? From honest and supportive jobs? And who profits from it every month? Emergency and Amnesty International?
Third, I don't know how old you are, but it doesn't matter. You still have time to retrace your steps or those who preceded you. Take my word for it when I tell you that internet was a really cool place in the very beginning and all these gentlemen - who used to buy and sell money and now do the same with our attention, focus, brainpower and even social skills - they didn't understand what the www was. And in part it still is. Because we are internet and, as I have already said too many times and I apologize for that, we are infinitely more unidentifiable than our digital versions...