Previous media ownership rules would have prevented Twitter from existing at its current scale. This was explicitly to prevent too much editorial control from becoming too concentrated.
Regardless of whether Musk buys Twitter, the long term trend is likely to continue, at least until one party decides to stop it. (Consolidation was largely driven by rule changes made by the Regan, Bush, Clinton and second Bush administration. Other factors have accelerated it since.)
E
Edit: I have a hard time having much sympathy for conservatives on this particular issue, since some rule changes were timed to allow conservative talk show networks to buy up large swaths of the US market, and also wre designed to allow Fox News to exist as a "entertainment" (obviously biased news) network. Having said that, liberal propaganda and conservative propaganda have the same root cause.
It's telling that the proposed "solution" to Twitter having censors is to let Elon Musk be the censor instead. The only thing that has worked in the past is decentralization of the news industry, but no one is calling for Twitter to be broken up. I guess both sides want it to exist so they can control it.
Previous media ownership rules would have prevented Twitter from existing at its current scale. This was explicitly to prevent too much editorial control from becoming too concentrated.
Regardless of whether Musk buys Twitter, the long term trend is likely to continue, at least until one party decides to stop it. (Consolidation was largely driven by rule changes made by the Regan, Bush, Clinton and second Bush administration. Other factors have accelerated it since.) E
Edit: I have a hard time having much sympathy for conservatives on this particular issue, since some rule changes were timed to allow conservative talk show networks to buy up large swaths of the US market, and also wre designed to allow Fox News to exist as a "entertainment" (obviously biased news) network. Having said that, liberal propaganda and conservative propaganda have the same root cause.
It's telling that the proposed "solution" to Twitter having censors is to let Elon Musk be the censor instead. The only thing that has worked in the past is decentralization of the news industry, but no one is calling for Twitter to be broken up. I guess both sides want it to exist so they can control it.