Elon Musk's attempt to acquire Twitter is another step in Big Tech's efforts to control our thoughts, writes Susie Alegre
of the way employees of his companies have been treated when exercising their free speech rights to criticise him might indicate that his commitment to free speech has its limits. But as Musk’s bid to takeover Twitter progresses in fits and starts, the potential for anyone to access and control billions of opinions around the world for the right sum should focus all our minds on the need to protect an almost forgotten right—the right to freedom of thought.
The assumption that getting inside our heads is a practical impossibility may have prevented lawyers and legislators from dwelling too much on putting in place regulation that protects our inner lives. But it has not stopped powerful people trying to access and control our minds for centuries. At his trial for War Crimes in Nuremberg after the Second World War, Albert Speer, Hitler’s former Minister of Armaments, explaining the power of the Nazi’s propaganda machine: “Through technical devices such as radio and loudspeaker 80 million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man…. Today the danger of being terrorized by technocracy threatens every country in the world.
When whole communities are deprived of independent thought, it undermines their individual rights to freedom of thought and opinion. But it is not only a threat to the rights of the people who are manipulated. As the world saw with Nazi Germany, it becomes a threat to all our rights.
was a wake up call to the potential for social media profiling and targeting to twist people’s minds inciting deadly violence. Facebook committed to doing better, but as the events that played out across the world’s screens from the
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