Harvard professor emerita says Elon Musk's Twitter takeover is 'fundamentally intolerable' and a threat to political stability
- Data privacy expert Shoshana Zuboff told the FT that Elon Musk's Twitter is a threat to democracy.
- The former Harvard Business School professor calls Musk's Twitter takeover "fundamentally intolerable."
Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emerita at Harvard Business school, said that Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter may pose a threat to democracy and society at large.
"Our political stability, our ability to know what's true and what false, our health and to some degree our sanity, is challenged on a daily basis depending on which decisions Mr Musk decides to take," the data privacy expert told the Financial Times.
In fact, Zuboff, the author of the 2019 book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," told the FT that the Musk takeover is "fundamentally intolerable" and that she is horrified by how tech billionaires could potentially exert control over the the spread of information.
Twitter did not immediately responded to Insider's request for comment.
Zuboff remarks comes after Twitter and Meta — which owns Facebook and Instagram — have decided to reactivate Donald Trump's social media accounts after he was banned for his potential to incite further violence following the January 6 Capitol riot in 2021.
Since Musk — who identifies as a "free-speech absolutist" — took over Twitter in late October of 2022, critics have expressed concerns over how his leadership may embolden right-wing viewpoints, enable the spread of disinformation, and allow hate speech to flourish on the platform.
Some of these concerns are already becoming a reality.
Since Musk became CEO of Twitter, he has reportedly suspended the Twitter accounts of several popular left-wing activists — in one reported case personally ordering the suspension of Chad Loder — while reactivating the accounts of white nationalists' such as Nick Fuentes.
Musk has claimed that hate speech impressions have decreased since he bought the company. However, The New York Times reported that racist, homophobic, and anti-semitic slurs have increased on the platform after Musk's takeover. And Musk, himself, continues to tweet conspiracy theories, such as one related to the assault of Nancy Pelosi's husband that he later deleted.
"I think he's intentionally empowering right-wing extremists," J.M. Berger, a researcher who studies extremism, previously told Insider.
But Zuboff thinks the risks of the Musk takeover and the corporate control of information by big tech are even bigger — and may result in unintended consequences.
"These spaces cannot exist solely under corporate control," Zuboff said. "We're two decades into the digital era but we have never, as democracies, taken stock of the meaning of these technologies."